Scholar’s Mate Review (PS5) – Nah, Mate
We’ve all had a crack at an escape room at some point in our lives. Arguing with your buddies over a trite trinket. Confusing each other with red herrings that are obviously too obvious. The one friend who gave up before they even went in as they couldn’t have their phone. They’re a fun, albeit silly venture, one that may damage more than deepen friendships. Scholar’s Mate is the quintessential escape room then: rage-inducing, confusing, prone to giving up and more of a curse to inflict on your friends than a boon.
That might sound harsh, but hear me out. The worst parts of escape rooms are the times you feel utterly lost, or when the puzzles aren’t solved through sense. Scholar’s Mate suffers both of these ailments, simultaneously giving you an Outlast-esque brute to “avoid” while you’re both lost and confused. A first-person horror game that’s never scary. An escape room puzzler that’s only dilemma is why you’re playing it in the first place.
Still want to lock yourself into this contraption and see why? I don’t know why you would, but I’ll enlighten you, as best I can.
Hospital Fate
We awake in a rather macabre hospital as Judith. You’ll know this because at some point you’ll see her name pop up. Try not to forget, though I’d forgive you for doing so. Judith herself seems barely interested in her predicament she finds herself in. Namely, that she was forcibly taken to a horrific seeming institution, and the rather small matter of a big, burly creature knocking her out.
It’d be quite the impressive feat to awake from that blissfully unbothered, but that’s Judith for you. As usual with any horror based title, there’s a bit of backstory to uncover. I say a bit, I mean a morsel. A poorly written, horribly executed morsel. Like a gone off, rotten mussel whose shell never opened. Rummage through some notes and you’ll get what Scholar’s Mate passes as backstory.
Now, I have a mental health professional background, so forgive me for being critical here. However, the game’s “efforts” to contextualise what happens within a mental illness framework is about as well crafted as a chocolate sword for a crusader in the Arabian desert. It’s borderline insulting and no amount of weak shock value images can do much to rectify that.
Throw in a terribly shoddy ending scene and an obscene lack of any real direction, and you come out with… this. If you couldn’t tell already, I didn’t like it. At all. Judith’s character is as emotionally empathetic as a wooden plank and what little exposition you’re given does nothing to sell the atmosphere of what’s happening.
No Mate of Mine
What of the horror and the puzzles I hear you ask? Scholar’s Mate is an escape room mixed with first-person horror, after all. Bluntly, the fear-factor is non-existent and the puzzles are more dumbfounding than seeing a grey dot on a white canvas sell for 13 million (true story). At a basic level, you’re placed into a small two-floor hospital wing with about ten rooms to unlock and explore.
Progressing means finding items in sequence through whichever room you can currently access, along with completing brain teasers. At a certain point, you’ll have the bulldog for a person skulking the halls looking for you at all times. Your movement is unceremoniously slow, to the point you might as well be a freight truck when crouching.
Which means you’ll do one of two things for the majority of the game: try to outrun lug-head over there, or spend an eternity crawling your way around at a pace a snail would laugh at. In either case, the AI will probably arbitrarily spot you, you’ll die and then have to do it again. While checkpoints are frequent, they have a nasty habit of triggering at the beginning of cutscenes. So if you die, prepare to watch them again.
Avoiding the creature was neither fun, tense or challenging, for me anyway. The idiot literally walks in a circle across both floors, and will only respond to sound when he feels like it. His detection range is made up on the spot when the game likes, and getting caught doesn’t elicit any fear. Instead, it’s just the depressing resignment to my inevitable fate. I’ll just die – again – and restart and run past him, again.
Hooray.
A Mate Worse Than Death
Then we come to the puzzles. Say what you will about lug-head, at least his pathing is consistent. These enigmas are prone to more obscurity than those “weird places on earth” Reddit threads. Finding combinations is simple enough, but one involved finding symbols in a bathroom which had a tiny illuminati symbol in the corner of a urinal?
I spent probably half of my less than two hours playtime just finding that one damn symbol. Whether it be tiny items hidden in the smallest of nooks or the logic to solving a conundrum requiring a masters degree in bull****ology, Scholar’s Mate’s puzzles are bewildering. Not in a good way most of the time either. I can imagine some people will like the approach it’s taken, and I’m willing to concede some of this is personal taste.
Even so, wasting my time with stupidly obnoxious riddles that are neither clever nor fun does not make for a good time. I liked a couple of them, with the rest either being boring and labourious, or non-sensical and ridiculous. I’ll let you be the judge of whether that’s a good mix or not. Aside from that, there are some slide pictures to find for… reasons? And a few books you need to collect to solve the final puzzle in what might be one of the weirdest approaches to a solution I’ve seen in a game.
Still, if you like escape rooms and their formulas, you might get a little more from this. I’d probably recommend you just do an actual escape room, but still. When I hit credits after finally finishing, my overwhelming feeling was one of relief. Not for escaping the “nightmare”, but so I could be safe in the knowledge I wouldn’t have to slog my way through it again. Not even for a platinum trophy.
A Scholarary Fail
I will give Scholar’s Mate its due in terms of the setting itself. The hospital is suitably dark, with a couple of disturbing efforts in its imagery. If nothing else, it looked the part of a horror game, which is something. It impressively messes this up in places too, from the jelly-like blood randomly strewn under a bin (but not in it), to the awfully imprinted still image on the loading screen that smashes in the final nail in the coffin to this game’s immersion.
Despite its short length, I struggled to muster the motivation to continue Scholar’s Mate even halfway through. I genuinely believe there was an idea and willing intent behind its conception, but almost every part of its whole seemed to be at odds with me actually gleaning enjoyment from it. For £9.79, there’s just a multitude of other things that’ll give you actual dopamine and serotonin in return. Scholar’s Mate will not.
If you’re super into escape rooms or you exclusively play horror games and you’ve completed Resident Evil 7 for the 7,809th time with nothing else to play, maybe give this a try. Even then, a real escape room with the horrors of interacting with other humans may provide a more chilling and enduring use of your time and money.
An earnest effort at recreating the puzzling contraptions of an escape room mixed with an Outlast-like antagonist, Scholar’s Mate falls victim to the most insipid storytelling, boring gameplay and obtuse puzzles. While it may look the part of a horror game, the only true terror will stem from the fact you could have just gone to a real escape room, and gotten more value for your money.
Scholar’s Mate is available now on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5 (review platform), PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X.
Developer: JanduSoft
Publisher: JanduSoft
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.
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