Disclaimer: A prototype of Escape Comics: The Alien Ship was provided for review purposes.

Exit games started hitting the market in 2016, and by 2017, it felt like they were everywhere, and since then I’ve only played 2 (Lord of the Rings, and The Enchanted Forest). I’ve done a handful of local Escape Rooms, and while I’ve enjoyed them, I would by no means ever call myself an expert. The Exit games I’ve played have been fun, but I always felt like the narrative was paper-thin and served as an excuse to move from puzzle to puzzle. Which is why when Evan Duxbury reached out and introduced me to Escape Comics: The Alien Ship, the promise of an escape room in a comic with a narrative focus really caught my attention.

Escape Comics: The Alien Ship is an escape room in a box, but the narrative exists in a comic book. Set from a first-person perspective, you’re in a spaceship and are suddenly awoken from chryosleep by your two teammates. The first order of business is to free your wrists from the shackles, and are prompted to open the first envelope. Lo and behold, the purple and green shackles from the comic book spill out onto your table, along with a dozen picks. It’s a surprisingly immersive experience when artifacts straight from the page are in your hands.

From there, the comic narrative takes you through a daring escape through an alien spaceship, with appropriately themed puzzles to complete. It may sound like a small thing, but Escape Comics did a really great job of making all the puzzle make sense for the story. You aren’t doing puzzles for the sake of doing puzzles, but they feel tied to the theme, which again, keeps you immersed in the game.

There isn’t a crazy amount of story, just two or three comic book pages between every puzzle. The story gives context to the puzzles and a consistent narrative through line for the experience. That being said, there are only 27 pages to the comic book, it’s not a grand epic, or a masterclass in science fiction story telling. There’s not much time to establish the characters, setting, stakes, and ambitions of every character. But Escape Comics offers a more coherent story than any of the other escape rooms in a box have offered that I’ve experienced. The art is decent, something that wouldn’t look out of place if it was sitting on the shelf at my local comic book store, either. With all the chiselled jawlines, bulging muscles in skin-tight suits, not to mention the viscera of exploding formics.

Each of the puzzles is contained in a string-tie envelope, and the puzzles themselves generally aren’t too difficult, nor do they require crazy leaps of logic. Once or twice, I knew what I was supposed to do, but I just couldn’t figure out how to manipulate the components. Or I was squinting and twisting my head to figure out exactly which symbol was being depicted. As I progressed through the story, the puzzles did get harder, giving me a bit of a sense of progression, which I enjoyed. The puzzles were fairly varied, from pattern recognition, to prop manipulation, to a funky jigsaw with a hidden message. Each one was different from the previous, making the discovery of each puzzle just a little bit exciting. Furthermore, none of the puzzles require you to destroy any components, allowing for players to reset the experience and hand the box off to a friend, which I very much appreciate.

Like many of the escape rooms in a box, there’s a three wheel dial where you can punch in your answers to reveal numbers. You pull the number from a deck of cards to see if your answer was correct, or wrong. There’s a decent clue system as well, where each puzzle has a few clues to gently lead you towards the solution, before giving you the answer outright on the solution card.

Instead of a win/loss condition, Escape Comics: The Alien Ship features a point system, where each time you need a hint or get an answer wrong, you deduct a number of points, and at the end of the experience, you just have a high score to brag about. The box also says for 1 – 4 players, but like most escape room in a box games, I don’t necessarily think that these experiences accommodate that many players. Particularly here, as some puzzles and clues are spread throughout the comic book pages, and it would be easy to miss if one person was reading the words out to the table. I know I get a little frustrated when someone else is trying to work out a mechanical puzzle, and I’m just sitting there, watching them, waiting for them to give him so I can have my turn to play with the toy. It’s for that reason that I’d suggest keeping it to 2 or less players. But if you’ve done an escape room in a box before, you’d already know this.

In the end, Escape Comics: The Alien Ship succeeds in the exact area where most escape room in a box games lose me: it makes the experience feel cohesive. The puzzles aren’t just obstacles to clear, they feel like actions taken within a story. Physically pulling props from envelopes that you’ve just seen illustrated on the page creates a small but meaningful bit of magic, one that keeps you immersed in the fiction rather than reminding you that you’re just solving disconnected brainteasers at your dining room table.

It’s not a sweeping sci-fi epic, and the puzzles won’t leave seasoned escape room veterans stumped for hours. But it delivers a tightly paced, thoughtfully integrated experience with enough variety and progression to stay engaging throughout. Add in the fact that nothing is destroyed, and the entire box can be reset and shared, and it becomes an easy recommendation for fans of the genre.

If you’ve ever wished your escape room in a box had just a little more narrative weight holding it together, Escape Comics: The Alien Ship might be exactly what you’re looking for. I’m genuinely curious to see where Douglas Beech and Evan Duxbury take the concept next, because this feels less like a one-off experiment and more like the start of a series with real potential.

Escape Comics: The Alien Ship is coming to Kickstarter on March 2026.