Trapped In The Web is a series of online, virtual escape rooms for you to play solo or in teams from anywhere in the world.
The rooms are text based and use pictures and videos as clues to help you solve the puzzles. It's definitely not a boring, linear, read and click game though - these puzzles are tough and you have to navigate back and forth through the rooms to find the right clues to solve the puzzles and get you to the next section.
Assemble your team, either over video chat, text message group or gathered round the same screen. Once you're ready, hit go and make your way through the virtual escape rooms, solving puzzles to escape!
You’ll have to create a login for the site, which should only take a couple of minutes and means you can access the game whenever you want. Once you purchase, the room gets added to your account and can always be accessed from your profile. If you're playing later, there's no time limit on it so just log in when you're ready to play and jump on from either the "Escape Rooms" page or from your profile.
These rooms are specifically designed to bring people together from different locations so there's no geographical restrictions and it's built to be played over video chat from different households or workstations.
As for gameplay, there’s a couple of different ways to play. The easiest option is to purchase one room pass per device so you can all view and navigate on your own screens. This gives each player full access to the room and really helps them work as part of a team, allowing each player to freely navigate around the room and interact with the clues.
It’s still perfectly doable by screen sharing on a video call. To play this way, the purchaser is the only one that controls the navigation of the room and your team helps you to crack the puzzles over the video chat - looking at the clues via screen share! I'd still recommend one pass per player though as it leaves you less at the mercy of technical hiccups from screenshare, lag on the puzzles and also avoids one player doing all the navigation and heavy lifting!
I suggest using something like Zoom, Teams or Webex for screen sharing but you can use whichever service you prefer!
I’d recommend saving the “clue” pictures that you find along the way and sharing them with your team over WhatsApp or something so you can refer back to them whenever you need them! There's a notepad feature within the rooms which I'd definitely recommend making full use of as it can be hard to remember all the clues you've found!
There's no limit on numbers but I'd recommend teams of 2 to 8 players. You can do more, but your video chats get a bit hard to manage! The game doesn't have an in-built video chat so it's up to you how you choose to communicate with your team. The rooms are text based with videos and images and can handle any number of players. Group packages allow you to have multiple sessions too so you can have several teams using the same group package.
Depending on your team's skill level and knack for solving puzzles, each escape room should provide 1-2 hours worth of fun! Some users have taken up to three hours to solve these rooms.
If you're not sure on which difficulty level to start with, I'd suggest giving School's Out, or Cabin Fever a go first. The Missing is a good one to start with if you're looking for something more video led.
I tend not to recommend these rooms for children on their own. There's no inappropriate content in the rooms but they are all designed to keep a group of adults busy for up to 3 hours so the puzzles in every room are challenging. Even the beginner rated rooms contain some tough puzzles which may be a little tough for younger players.
Having said that, teachers have successfully run these rooms with young classes before and many families have taken on these rooms with younger players so it's certainly possible! Just be aware that it may take a fair amount of adult supervision and guidance. If you decide that your child is up to the challenge, I'd recommend School's Out.
Once you sign up and pay for a game, that game will be added to your account, giving you permanent access all for a one-off payment. If you buy a group package, you can manage this booking on your profile. All the passes you've bought will display there, and you can assign those passes to your players using their email addresses.
Trapped In The Web has some perfect group packages for a remote working team building exercise or for big group bookings, these will also save you some money! Simply head to the group bookings page, choose which room you want to take on then purchase enough passes for all your players. Although it's possible to play with one pass per team over screen-share, it's a much more interactive experience if each player gets access on their own device - allowing each player to have full control rather than relying on one player to do all the heavy lifting.
When you purchase a group package, all the passes you've bought will appear in the "my group bookings" section of your profile. You can then assign each pass to each of your players using their email address. They'll be sent an email asking them to create an account and once they do, that room pass will automatically be added to their account. Each device accessing the link starts a new session so nothing that one team does in their room will impact another teams game. As teams will be working together over video chat to solve the puzzles, they'll never go out of sync with one another.
You can even make it more competitive by removing the hints and tips from your game. For this, you need a non-playing member of your group to act as a moderator who can control how many hints, tips and answers that each team gets given. To play like this, just toggle the hints off on your profile in "manage my group bookings". The moderator should have the main hints page open in front of them during the game (accessible under the hint toggle). When teams get stuck, they can contact the moderator who can decide who gets hints when and even assign penalties for overuse.
No! The beauty of Trapped In The Web is that these passes never expire once purchased and remain permenantly on the players account, allowing for as many replays as you like. With group purchases, you will occassionally see a "This link has expired" notice - this is not referring to the pass itself, simply the setup link in the email. This link expires after 24/48 hours in order to protect your data but you can resolve this easily by clicking the "resend email" button in your group console. This will give them a new setup link to access their room. To avoid seeing this message, just have your players click the link in their email as soon as they recieve it - as it never expires, there's no harm in them clicking through, getting set up then returning to play at a later point.
These rooms are totally online so there's no external software for you to download as it's all hosted in your browser.
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You can! I'm still working on building a gift system but there's a way you can do it for now. Just create an account for your giftee, purchase a room or rooms on that account and then send them the login details. Just avoid using their email address for sign up if it's a surprise to avoid them being sent a confirmation email. Alternatively, you can purchase a group package (minimum 2 players) for your giftee then send them the room using their email address in the "manage my group bookings" section of your profile.
