Thinky Direct 2025: Parallel Experiment proves that getting locked in a deadly puzzle room is better with friends

Dayten Rose, 4 June 2025

I’ve always found it pretty shocking that the concept of an escape room originated from the escape room games of the Flash era. But it makes sense: mechanical doors, arcane ball-and-magnet mechanisms, and rooms pumped full of neurotoxin are a lot of overhead for your average strip mall. That’s why with the upcoming co-op puzzle game Parallel Experiment, developer Eleven Puzzles is attempting to blend the best parts of physical escape rooms with the best parts of their webgame counterparts. It’s an escape room game, 2.0.

I booted up the demo alongside my partner, and before even getting to the gameplay, I should acknowledge how core that act is all by itself. Unlike other similar games we’ve played together, Parallel Experiment is built from the ground up as a real-time co-op experience. That’s already pretty rare for a point-and-click title—I mean, it’s strictly unnecessary. There are very few timing-based puzzles that would actually require the kind of air traffic control approach of a live Discord call. But because the game goes that extra mile to incorporate online co-op, it gets to employ small flourishes that make me feel like I’m actually in the room with my co-detective. (Namely, tapping on the glass window into their room to annoy them, or blaring a car horn at them, etc., etc.)

Of course, that also means you won’t be able to play this game alone or offline, so caveat emptor. Also, at least for the demo, if one player disconnects for any reason, the whole 60-minute demo resets to the beginning. We didn’t have that problem, but if I were taking advantage of the game’s crossplay on mobile, I could see some frustration there. Not sure what the full game will have in store in terms of save states.

The story follows two detectives, Ally and Old Dog, who wake up in a room and are told to solve puzzles or die by a guy who… look, we all know what a guy who locks detectives in a room full of deadly puzzles sounds like. A bit of Riddler, a bit of Jigsaw. Told in somewhat lengthy (but skippable) comic book panels between levels, the story of Parallel Experiment is mostly a means to an end. My partner and I occasionally sniped at the pleasantly campy NCIS dialogue, but we mostly used these scenes as a chance to go feed the cat, refresh our drinks, that sort of thing.

Puzzle setups are similarly practical. See that door with the three electronic locks? See the three glowing puzzle boxes on each of the room’s three sides? You can connect the dots. Parallel Experiment presents very few obstacles between the players and the puzzles, and very little ambiguity regarding how to interact with them, when they’re solved, and whether something is or isn’t a puzzle in the first place. This clarity is especially important in a medium where you can’t go flipping sofas and sticking your arm into a light fixture when you get stuck.

The puzzles themselves varied considerably, both in character and in their ability to spark engaging conversations. But they all relied on separating the players, giving them shared goals but different, complementary toolsets to achieve them. A pipe puzzle turned into a full-blown negotiation between me and my partner as we worked to untangle our own messes of plumbing while not tangling each other’s. (We also made full use of the drawing tool that lets you mark up anything on your screen. You can only see your own drawings, which is a bummer, but I can see how the alternative could stymie verbal communication.) Another safecracking puzzle stumped us until we realised the faulty assumptions we had made about what the other could see.

Of the nine or so puzzles that appeared in the demo, those two especially hit the sweet spot between giving us enough information in common to work together, but not so much that we didn’t need each other. The remaining puzzles fell somewhere on either end of that spectrum.

On the one hand were your standard lock-and-key puzzles, where one of us had access to a piece of info, like a door code, that the other lacked. More involved, but not necessarily more complex, were the ones that had both of us looking at the same screen, trying to solve the same problem. For example, an arcade game had us placing tracks in order to direct a pair of mice to a piece of cheese. We both had some ideas about how to complete the task, but neither of us needed the other to test those ideas. We mostly sat in silence.

Then, on the other end, are puzzles that effectively blind one player to their surroundings, requiring the other player to guide their hand. In theory, this is a complementary exercise, except that the resulting conversation typically goes something like, “Left, left, OK no right, just a little more right, OK left again.”

The full game will span a large section of Kraków with various environments to explore. But the spirit of the escape room game is strong here, and I don’t get the sense that giving the team more room to stretch out will compromise the tight room-by-room design that is their strength. Parallel Experiment remains focused on exploring physical spaces together, as improbably jam-packed with puzzles and passcodes as they may be.