Game review: The Honeymoon is Over

The Honeymoon is Over is an 'escape the room' puzzle game from TimeFall. Like other games in its sub-genre, the premise is to figure out how to escape from a locked room or series of rooms.

Summary of analysis
No tutorial elements leading to a grating new player experience, mediocre gameplay experience, mouse-driven controls and minimal interface, moderately-appealing graphics, and pleasant/relaxing choice of background music.

Tutorial/New player experience
One day I'll see a game in this genre with tutorial elements... today, however, maintains the status quo. The new player experience is, in all honesty, terrible. The Honeymoon is Over, like many titles in the escape games style dumps the player with no explanation and questionable sequence logic straight into the gameplay leaving them to figure out everything through trial and error. Thankfully, most escape games, this instance included, are short.

Gameplay experience
The game's title also serves as a somewhat apt description of the gameplay experience. It's all hard work and optional reward, with the player having to figure out the developer's particular sense of logic through brute-force random effort. Sadly, there appears to be an incomplete features in the game, the phone and magazine combination, which only adds to the confusion when the player puts forth the efforts to no visible benefit.
In no way could I blame someone for looking up a walkthrough for a game such as this, it can make the difference between fifteen minutes and two hours.
There is also no replay value to the game as there is only one solution and a single, disappointing ending.

Interface & Controls
The game has a completely mouse-driven control scheme. The gameplay interface consists of an inventory bar and darkening edges which show movement between screens. There's a couple of zoom-in on object windows that feature an option to reverse the orientation of the objects in order to pursue objectives, however, these lack any icon or cues that signify the possibility.

Graphics
The game's graphics are decent, though the towel really looks more like a throw pillow. There's also no real way to tell apart interactive objects and non-interactive objects without clicking on them, leaving a player to click on every single object in the rooms *cough* multiple times *cough*. To its merit, everything appears to have been drawn in a single artistic style, adding to the level of professionalism and avoiding the jarring effects that can occur with haphazardly-gathered clip art.

Music & Sound
The background music fits the theme of a vacation/honeymoon getaway, creating a more relaxed mood than one may expect from the situation of being trapped. I personally find it to be an interesting choice of trying to reinforce the casual style of gameplay that the theme contrasts.

Commentary
I imagine that there's a sizable audience for escape games out there, players that enjoy the abstract and often convoluted sense of logic. Sadly, I've yet to see a single game in the whole sub-genre that manages good game design principles.
As a game design attempt, escape games are incredibly easy to put together but doing so with quality manages to be an almost holy grail of its style of gameplay. An internal hint system really would need to be available and well-built to keep things flowing. Next, the game needs to avoid relying on external knowledge or skills (I've actually seen one escape game that had a sudoku puzzle embedded, but never explained it). A helpful interface/graphics scheme that actually helps the player avoid clicking everything repeatedly would really cut down on wasted play time. Music and sound can be used to set the mood but is unnecessary.