You are locked in an unfamiliar bathroom. And whoever lives here must be overly enamoured of logic puzzles...
Trace
is a free to play, HTML5 Room Escape Game by colorbomb. Set on an alien planet and somewhat Myst-like, it contains very little in the way of a story - the player never learns what they're doing inside a bungalow in outer space, how they came to be there or why they're escaping - but quite a lot of juicy puzzles.
An interesting feature is the in-game camera carried by PC, with 6 slots for photos of things that may be useful later.
Has absolutely nothing to do with the webcomic.
Tropes:
- Alien Sky: Several large, colourful planets are visible on it. They provide clues to some puzzles.
- All Planets Are Earth-Like: Despite the planet (or the moon, as the taxt underneath the game says) being obviously in another solar system, it has breathable atmosphere, ordinary sand and sandstone, and lush fronds (possibly responsible for the atmosphere).
- Beautiful Void: There's a cozy little house and a small tower on a rather nice swatch of an alien planet. The PC is the only person there, no animals whatsoever appear, the in-game written documents are all heavily stained and unreadable, and while the house has electrical power, there's nothing to indicate where it comes from.
- Block Puzzle: The lock on the inside of the bathroom door is a version of Klotski.
- Chekhov's Gun: The pentagonal padlock in the bathroom is the one thing separating you from freedom.
- Context-Sensitive Button: Some of the red buttons in the large room turn on the machines, some don't, but they're all a part of a larger puzzle.
- Closing Credits: The "Making of" sort, with development sketches and thanks to everyone who contributed.
- Enter Solution Here: There's a number of puzzles that consist of discovering some sort of a password. Some of them are easy, some are not.
- Fictional Document: The large room contains a photographical album and books about a "wayward astronaut" that provide clues to the puzzles, if not to what you are doing there.
- Goodies in the Toilets: The toilet is locked with a pentagonal padlock and you can't open it until you come back to the bathroom with a matching key, open the "toilet" and discover it is the exit.
- Grid Puzzle: The lock on the outside door needs you to place the gold stars in the correct cells of the grid.
- Guide Dang It!: An egregious instance. You can, in fact, leave the room at the ground floor of the tower... by clicking on the puzzle, even unsolved, because it's on the door and the player character apparently turned around after entering.
- Lock and Key Puzzle: The game has a number of locks with keys hidden in very odd places. Several of the Set Piece Puzzles also need an object or objects to be accessed.
- Minigame: Three minigames are accessed through the in-game computer (on the desk in the largest room), after entering passwords: two "control the tiny robot" games (you also need to obtain the robots and put them in the right positions first), and "Mathemagic".
- Moon Logic Puzzle: Some of the puzzles are self-contained and make perfect sense (once you get past the practicality of locking one's house with a logic puzzle). Several require you to remember an easily-missed thing half the game world away (such as the wheel on the patio, where you need to enter the arrangement of the plants in the bathroom - which you can no longer access at the moment or to make rather bizarre inferences. There's also a drawer that only opens if you open the other drawers in a certain order and a tiny piano that you have to play the password on . Also, you obtain a screwdriver by solving two consecutive difficult puzzles, at which point it's easy to forget why you needed a screwdriver in the first place.
- Schizo Tech: There's a battered-up computer, a wooden planetarium, tiny robots, lots of old-fashioned lightbulbs, and the whole thing takes place on an alien planet. Space travel is definitely possible in the setting.
- Set Piece Puzzle: Many and varied, both pure logic and pure logic combined with (visual, symbol or number) passwords or objects that need to be found in order to make a machine work.
- Shout-Out: The "wayward astronaut" books have illustrations in which the title character looks curiously like Wally.
- Stylistic Suck: The "Mathemagic" educational game with its Paint graphics and an Excuse Plot typical for 90' educational games for kids. You need to play it to figure out a password.
- Who Forgot The Lights?: The rooms inside the tower (both ground floor and upstairs) are rather dark, too dark to be readable on some monitors especially that one of the puzzles in the ground floor room consists of turning the lights off.
- You Wake Up in a Room: You begin the game locked in a bathroom. How you got to be there, or your connection to whoever lives (or lived) in the house, is never explained. The bathroom serves as a warm-up of sorts - you have to solve all the puzzles in it to enter the main game area.
