Forgiveness: Escape Room

Forgiveness: Escape Room is a solo developer's set of seven first-person escape rooms, one for each deadly sin, plus an intro room. A personality quiz picks your sin, or you can choose any room from the menu. Normal mode gives sound cues and no timer; Extreme gives you 30 minutes per room with no help. It suits players who like hard, sometimes cryptic puzzles in a grim, Saw-like setting.

Steam reception is mostly positive, with about 70 percent of 104 reviews recommending it, and players vote it a difficult game. Fans enjoy the challenge and the moment a tough solution clicks. Critics say some puzzles rely on leaps of logic, and that a few links between room and sin are a stretch. Each room holds only two or three puzzles, so most players finish everything in two to four hours.

The recurring complaints are technical: scenes so dark that players had to raise their brightness to see clues, carrying only one item at a time, items that are hard to pick up again, typos, and bugs that blocked some players. Buy it on sale if you like tough puzzles and can live with rough edges; skip it at full price.