Review: Scholar’s Mate

Developer – JanduSoft

Publisher – JanduSoft

Platforms – PC (reviewed), PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

Review copy given by publisher

When was the last time you went to an escape room you couldn’t get out of? What if the stakes are raised because someone is chasing after you? That’s the scenario Scholar’s Mate puts you in as they ramp up the horror aspect. You play as Judith, a young woman on a journey who suddenly wakes up in an asylum. There’s no obvious reason as to why you are in an asylum, but you are trapped and must get out.

Unlike other escape rooms, you are relentlessly hunted by a stalker out to kill you. There’s no pause window or invincibility frame to protect you as you solve puzzles. That stalker wants you gone and you must escape. There’s no inherent time limit but you don’t want to be there longer than you have to.

Scholar’s Mate does a great job of ramping up the scary atmosphere, making you dread exploring every location. The lighting isn’t generous and the decayed design makes you wonder how long it’s been abandoned. Blood is often everywhere and creepy markings adorn some rooms. Even though you must proceed, you dread the possibility of what’s beyond the door. Fortunately, most of the asylum is quite ordinary. The real dread comes from your stalker.

Shortly after you begin your adventure, you encounter an unstoppable being that stalks you. It’s not as fast as you, but it’s fast enough that it punishes you for being slow. If you get stuck or shut yourself in a room with the stalker, it might be the end. Or you can crouch and hide, hoping that the stalker passes without noticing you.

The stalker is always searching for you, constantly prowling the asylum when it first appears. You must balance puzzle-solving with the occasional hiding as the stalker doesn’t care about your puzzles. They want you gone and if you aren’t paying attention, that’s the end of your game. Fortunately, the only penalty is going back to your last autosave and you can always experiment from there.

The combination of the atmosphere and the pressure from the stalker presents an unforgettable horror experience. Solving puzzles becomes a herculean task when you hear footsteps in the distance. Choosing a hiding place is difficult when the stalker is hot on your heels. If you are too slow or peek out at the wrong time, everything is over. Even though you are safe behind the screen, the sheer terror Judith is feeling is transmitted to you.

However, the horror experience is the game’s only strong aspect. Puzzle solving is a nightmare because the solutions are not obvious. The clues are scattered locally but the logical connections are hard to make. Finding a lock combination should be simple but the hints don’t point to a proper solution as an example. You might even try brute-forcing an answer because you have nothing left to lose.

While hard puzzles are not bad, the clues don’t have an obvious connection to the puzzle. This makes it difficult to realize what you are looking at and whether it is relevant. Piecing together the answers takes some big leaps of logic, something you can’t easily do with the stalker chasing you around. This makes the game significantly less scary and more frustrating, cutting into its greatest advantage.

The difficulty levels are also stuck to make the game more challenging. There’s an easier setting that supposedly lets you see the stalker’s view and hearing, but it never shows. It’s also hard to see that an object can be interacted with; the visual cues are small. This makes it difficult to know that objects are relevant or you are staring at something useless. For visually impaired players, this is a big inconvenience.

Scholar’s Mate isn’t a long game if you know what to do, but the game’s story isn’t told well. Despite having a good horror atmosphere, the emphasis is mainly on the puzzles and the stalker. Real-life escape rooms may not have the most detailed story, but there is one you can follow. The story in Scholar’s Mate takes a long time to develop, and with the frustrating puzzles, you may never see it.

Overall, Scholar’s Mate is a good and short horror experience that simulates a high-pressure escape room. The terror is never far away and you are scared to keep going. But that is quickly replaced with frustration because complicated puzzles and a poor story don’t help. It’s a quick horror game that helps you enjoy an escape room, but it holds itself back in unfortunate ways.