Yay! And once again, yay! Neutral released a new game!
This year starts really great for escapers, good games are coming one after another. Neutral returns after two years pause and it's a pleasure, indeed!
You are locked in a nice and comfortable living room with obligatory couch and a pot plant, and a fish tank with few vicious piranhas guarding a key. They are not friendly. The warning sign is very clear. Life is easier with two hands and all fingers, believe me.
So, the key isn't accessible from obvious reasons, but you don't know which lock it opens anyway, so forget the fish for now and look around the room. There are two texts in Japanese visible in plain sight, but don't worry, you don't need to understand, they are not important for getting through. Clever and interesting puzzles are waiting for you!
I've done enough talking - it's time for action - go!
Have a good time with another great escape game!
Walkthrough.
Exploration
Collect the wooden tablet on the table. It reads, "rotate items by dragging your mouse."
Collect the key behind the frog painting.
Collect the mushroom stamp behind the plant on the window sill.
Collect the spool of rope under a cushion on the sofa.
Turn left. Move the large plant and take the torn piece of paper behind the sofa.
Take the remote control behind the "DANGER" note.
Turn left. There is something orange between the left-hand-side wall and the computer desk. Zoom in and take the orange triangle.
Open the middle drawer of the computer desk (which should have an arrow painted inside) and leave it open.
Turn left. A purple square is visible on the middle drawer. Take it.
Laptop
Use your key to open the left drawer of the TV cabinet. Take the battery inside.
Put the battery into the remote control. Turn on the TV.
The second channel shows the duck painting above the laptop. The fourth channel shows six stars in the laptop's password input. You need to type the password on your computer's keyboard.
The laptop does not hide the password input behind stars, so the password is, truly, "******".
In the laptop, turn down the camera so that a blue star falls down. Take the blue star and calculate the four-digit password.
Notice the orientation of the star and the triangle.
40 * 61 + 89 = 2529
Use the four-digit password on the right drawer of the TV cabinet. Take the printer and the snowman stamp.
Install the printer on the laptop. Input the ID written on the torn piece of paper (i.e. type "secret" into the prompt) and a sheet of paper will be printed out.
Use the sheet of paper as clue, unlock the box with four buttons under the piranha tank.
The sheet of paper reads, "NEWNEWS". Take a look at the books near the laptop.
With the red arrow pointing up, the sequence is:
Up, right, left, up, right, left, down.
Collect the hook in the box.
Fishing
Combine the hook with the spool of rope. Fish out the brass key in the piranha tank.
Open the wall niche on the right of the TV with the brass key. Take the tree stamp and the wrench inside.
Open the drawer in front of the TV with the wrench. Place the three stamps on the correct slot.
The clue is on the wooden tablet, and you need to view things from above.
Tree stamp on the top left corner. Mushroom stamp on the middle right. Snowman stamp on the middle of the bottom row.
Collect the card in the drawer and insert it in the card slot above the sofa. Press the white button to turn the light off. You should see something above the TV.
27=481563
Above the laptop, where the duck painting should be, there is another clue.
7463
Find the remaining clues.
Behind the lion painting: 5218
Behind the frog painting: FR1G
Solve the mystery.
Frog is FR1G, so the number 1 is the letter o.
1 is o. 2 is i. 3 is k. 4 is u. 5 is l. 6 is c. 7 is d. 8 is n.
"27=481563" is "id=unlock".
Operate the printer and take the new sheet of paper. Use the clue on the sheet to unlock the locked door.
Think in 3D
Collect the two cubes behind the door. They hide a three-digit password.
The clue is the picture next to the lion painting. Unwrap the cube as shown, where the face with the white letter should match the white square, etc.
It should read:
__N
_TI
OHN
NRE
EE
_E
Or, 139.
Use the password on the highest drawer of the computer desk. Take the cuboid inside.
Set your cubes and cuboid in an appropriate place.
Set your cubes inside the wall niche where the sheep are. The white sides of the blocks should read "EXIT".
Shut the doors.
Escape!
In case you're wondering, the sign above the books reads "Close what you open", which
is a clue for the final step in the game.
Papillon is the cutest doggie ever!
I really liked the graphics, mechanics, and responsiveness of that game. The ability to manipulate inventory items adds a great element too. I really look forward to more Neutral escape games in the future!
Lovely game, had me scratching my head a few times! Manipulating inventory really adds something to the game. Well done Neutral!
In case you did not play them:
https://jayisgames.com/tag/neutral
I hope to see new Neutral games in the future too.
Waiting two years is very long!
I am really disappointed in Neutral for using Unity when it adds nothing to their game, except for preventing people from playing it. This was truly one of the greatest escape developers, now reduced to yet another insipid fad-follower. This is a big blow to quality escape, especially right after losing Tesshi-e. Another one bites the dust!
@andr01d:
You should know that recent Unity content can run on any updated browser and decent/recent hardware, no additional installation required. (I'm ignoring mobile browsers, where neither Flash nor Unity are officially supported.)
On the other hand, Flash won't be supported anywhere by end 2020 (and that includes all the browser plugins!), which means that you'll need a specialized, unofficial, insecure setup to play any Flash games then. Even now, at the start of 2018, you'll need to jump through some hoops to play Flash games in Chrome and Firefox.
Thus, the criticism should actually run in the opposite direction: Flash developers are excluding future players, the majority of whom can already handle Unity.
As for quality: the still-ongoing trend of Unity games being unpolished doesn't apply to escape games, especially ones that are featured here. Developers who switch to Unity make games with equally good or better graphics than before, gaining the occasional bonus like smooth animations and 3D navigation. (There are downsides in terms of CPU usage and filesize, but these do not affect the gameplay experience.)
TL;DR Unity's not just a fad, it's inevitable. If the Unity escapes don't work for you, I'm curious to know why.
Hi, I'm having trouble (garbled graphics) with Unity browser games on both Chrome and Firefox on my Win7 laptop, but they are OK on my Win7 desktop at work. The browsers are all current & up-to-date. Do you know why? Thanks.
There are no flies on Neutral!
omg! the items being in full 3-d is so COOL ???
I think the main advantage of a 3D engine (like Unity) is that you can easily display different item states from different perspectives.
In flash escape games, you rarely see doors or drawers left open when you "back up" from a view, because it would require too many additional images.
I expect 3D engines will yield a greater variety of puzzles in escape games.
I agree. This makes it extra sad that most of the great escape room designers have stopped making games.
I have the feeling we already have a solid game to be part of the list of the Best games 2018!
Wow, awesome game! :)
Great puzzles, and I love the 3D effects.
@andr01d:
If you finished the game, you'll note all the ways Neutral utilized 3d features in the puzzles as well as the general design. We can compare this to various "fake" 3d effects in Neutral's past games that aren't Unity based (e.g. ELEMENTS), or any other non-Unity escape games.
As one example, just think about turning over an item.
-non-Unity: click in some arbitrary place to flip it over; just two views of the object (or in general, discrete number of views).
-Unity: drag around and investigate any part of the object you want; arbitrarily many perspectives.
At least three different puzzles in SIGN would be pointless or tedious exercises if "rotate to find the right perspective" was reduced to "click the right spot and you get the right perspective immediately". This is something actually new in this space. There's a lot more potential for this mechanic in escapes.
Even if you take that as a gimmick, there's all the nice animation and modeling and lighting and so forth that Unity is directly built for, rather than doing the modeling elsewhere and shoving it into a flash game. SIGN feels more alive to me than some other escapes on the basis of its animations alone. If Neutral had given a fade effect to the light turning on/off, it would be that much better.
Unity's no fad, and "insipid"? The game operates as smoothly as every past Neutral game, same look & feel, with plenty of clever puzzles that could have been made in any engine, and has this new interaction mechanic - but because you saw a Unity preloader, Neutral is "insipid" and they've "bitten the dust"?
Sorry, that ended too angrily and I'm kinda necroing that thread anyway, but it just seems odd for the mere fact of certain technology being used to do the same thing as before, to so overshadow your experience of the game. What's concretely worse about the game due to the engine?
Amazing game as always but does anyone know why the other
rooms are not activated ? or some contact info of the developer ?
I enjoy them a lot I hope they're not closing.
I can still play the old rooms in Flash. I wonder if maybe Mya will be re-releasing them in Unity?
Update