[Review] Tested on Humans: Escape Room - Nintendo Switch

Developed and Published By: Mc2Games
Categories: Escape Room, Puzzle
Release Date: 05.12.21

Notice: The game would not allow for screen capture, so I could not take images of the game. I also could not find a proper web page for Tested on Humans outside of a Steam page.

If you’ve read my review of Palindrome Syndrome, most of my issues there are going to be the exact same here. Those being, the lack of using the left stick or touch screen for puzzles and investigation screens. Tested on Humans is more or less the exact kind of game as Palindrome Syndrome, an Escape Room puzzler. You do puzzles in small room, it opens up more puzzles, to soon open the room up. There’s bigger rooms, rooms that branch out, you’ll go room to room working your brain.

What separates the two is the theming. While Palindrome Syndrome is more scifi, futuristic kind of game, Tested on Humans has a more modern, grounded approach. You wake up in a prison cell, your name on the wall, you’re lost, confused. The further you get in, the more you learn about what is going on.

Puzzles can be and start rather easy. Paying attention to your surroundings, simple pattern recognition, stuff like that. A few get quite devilish, like a keypad mentioning missing faces. Turns out, each cell has the faces of a six sided dice on it’s walls…except one. Those are the missing faces. Another, almost directly after it is a keypad with some simple math. Ignore the math though, what you want is to see how many lines each number has in the equation, that’s your answer. It’s clever, and I wouldn’t have immediately thought to think of those as the answers. It’s satisfying to solve puzzles like this.

I did notice that the game had less framerate issues than Palindrome Syndrome, which was nice to see and feel. The issue again though, is that I’d love something that offers just a bit more precision for the puzzle screens. It doesn’t come off as as big of an issue as it was in Palindrome Syndrome, but it did get in the way occasionally.

While I’d argue that both Tested on Humans and Palindrome Syndrome have the same pros and cons, I almost think I prefer Tested on Humans for a more grounded feel. I really wish for a touchscreen update though. Games like this that control with a mouse on PC that get ported to the Switch really need a touch screen option or else I almost have to suggest the PC version as opposed to the Switch release.