If you’ve been doom-scrolling through the App Store or Google Play, looking for a new game that respects your intelligence (and challenges it quite a bit), stop searching – I have the perfect game for you.
With the mobile gaming market drowned in gacha trash and mindless auto-battlers, a small two-person indie team from Japan just dropped a title that feels like a love letter to the golden age of room escape adventures.
It’s called Haven – Escape Room Game, and if you’re a fan of atmospheric brain-teasers like Rusty Lake or the The Room series, you will feel right at home and enjoy this one too.
Developed by IzumiArtisan, Haven follows the classic room escape premise: you wake up in an unfamiliar, unsettling space with zero exit in sight, but you have to exit.
There’s no tutorial fairy holding your hand here, no mindless clicking, just you, your thoughts, and difficult puzzles to exit the room.
Also read some of my previous walkthroughs: Legendary Tales 5 Chapter 1 and the Legendary Tales Chapter 2 walkthrough here.
The game relies on quiet exploration, requiring you to scour the handcrafted environment for subtle clues that will help you progress towards reaching your objective.
And let me tell you something now – while most “puzzle” games nowadays are silly “trial and error” type of time wasters, or just color-matching simulators in disguise, Haven offers a true, genuine challenge for the more hardcore escape the room crowd.
And even though you will complete the game in 1-2 hours, depending on your experience, it still provides a satisfying mix of observation and logical thinking to solve the puzzles, and is the perfect “one-and-done” evening game for anyone tired of endless grinding.
The technicalities are equally impressive, as this game wasn’t made over the weekend as a cash cow. Instead, IzumiArtisan states the game represents “several years of ideas” refined into this final product. It’s rare to see that level of polish and dedication in a free-to-play mobile title that explicitly promises “minimal, non-intrusive ads.”
The game is available globally, with support for various languages including English, French, German, and Japanese. If you think you’ve got the IQ to break out without looking up a walkthrough, you can grab Haven right now: here on Google Play or here on the App Store.
And once you’re done, focus on a few other games we wrote about in the past and shared walkthroughs for: Edge of Reality: Lost Secrets of the Forest Walkthrough or the Secrets of Salem: Phantom Cab walkthrough.
Hardcore mobile gamer, spending way too much time in front of his Android device. Enjoys playing RPGs mainly and will always go for a pixel-style game before anything else. He co-founded App Amped together with his better half, Ailin.