is a single-player adventure game in the “escape room” style developed by LEAP Game Studios, a small indie studio active since 2020. Although not widely known, it has consistently received positive reviews for its work.
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Set in the mid-2000s, the game's objective will be establishing a LAN connection between several computers and solving small puzzles in the seven levels that make it up.
The developers wanted to focus on the nostalgia effect, aiming to evoke those now obsolete aspects of the previous digital era: tangled cables, unstable internet connections, floppy disks, and programs that demanded extreme precision in command inputs.
The element that unites all the levels of the game and moves us forward in its story will be the disappearance of a boy from our group of friends: a child dealing with a difficult moment in life, who vanishes leaving behind few traces.
Taking advantage of our summer work as expert LAN organisers, we’ll end up infiltrating computer systems, until we close the loop on our friend’s disappearance and the identity of a mysterious figure.
The gameplay revolves around moving those PCs, connecting them together, and thankfully no longer having to lose our minds over programs where the user experience was a nightmare and there was no way to find online help. The game’s progression thus recalls a typical Escape Room experience, to be underscored by the fact that each level’s end is always tied to opening a door for escaping the room...
The levels will be split into two phases. The first will be an exploration phase, allowing players to collect all necessary items to establish the LAN, find hidden objects, and complete the connection.
The second stage will be solving some small puzzle to access the data saved on the PCs, the most common obstacle being recovering the passwords.
In this simplicity of Gameplay emerge two shortcomings that risk making it tedious. The first is the inability to access our inventory when using a PC, forcing us to keep paper and pencil handy to take notes. The second is the lack of hints if we get stuck . The option to call a friend from the crew turns out useless and redundant, as it merely repeats the task already told us to do in the top left.
To save the game from repetitiveness, its few hours to complete will be key. Linking computers level after level in the same identical way, without variation, doesn’t offer much in terms of gameplay. A simple addition of just a few mini-games on PC — perhaps imitations of classics from the era like Space Invaders or Tetris — would significantly enrich the experience.
To slightly improve replayability, once the game is completed, players can revisit the “mysteries” uncovered to unlock the secret ending and recover what’s missing by replaying individual levels. However, I encountered the most annoying bug: attempting to recover a missing document from the first level, after completing the mission, the “select level” and “view mysteries” options became locked. To use them, I had to redo the entire adventure from the start, despite having chosen to replay a single level.
The graphics don’t stand out either in style or in quality: it’s not a game to admire for its visual rendering. Yet, for gameplay and story, it works well and doesn’t need improvements. The Unreal Engine is handled with restraint, allowing the game to run even on underpowered PCs; to be honest, it’s surprising that the minimum requirements demand as little as 8 GB of RAM.
Lan Party Adventures is a small nostalgic dip into the 2000s, with tangled cables, floppy disks and programs impossible to use without paper and pen. The game manages to entertain thanks to its escape room formula, but it doesn’t hide its limitations: reduced replayability, lack of effective hints and a certain repetitiveness make the experience at times frustrating. It would have been nice to find some mini-games on PC or more practical tools for noting down and managing objects, but even so, for a few hours, the title manages to entertain. In the end, it’s a curious and nostalgic indie, with the virtue of not taking itself too seriously, but which could have given more with a few tweaks.
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