Play
Escape Rooms
Point-and-click puzzle rooms and short adventure games where the entire mechanic is noticing something. Bring patience and a scratch pad.
12 sites
Minimalist colour puzzle rooms — yellow, blue, red — where every level teaches you a rule the game never states out loud.
- 10 min
A blog that has been finding the best browser escape and point-and-click games every week since 2005, and is still posting.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
A few hundred browser escape rooms in one filtered shelf, all running in the tab with nothing to install and nothing to buy.
- 2 min
A daily firehose of new escape games from Japanese and indie developers, with walkthroughs in the comments for when you stall.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Home of the GROW games, where you choose an order for a handful of objects and then watch a tiny world assemble or fail.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Every point-and-click game indie developers have uploaded to itch, most playable in the tab, most made by exactly one person.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
The review site that effectively invented walkthrough culture for escape games, with an archive going back nearly two decades.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
A twenty-level escape game from 2001 that defined the whole genre several years before the genre had a name for itself.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Home of Submachine and Daymare Town, Mateusz Skutnik's sketched, wordless worlds built entirely out of corridors and quiet dread.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
The Cube Escape series in full and free — bleak Dutch point-and-click rooms with a lake, a lot of birds and a plot you assemble sideways.
- 10 min
The first Samorost, free in the browser, a wordless point-and-click about a small gnome diverting a planet off a collision course.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
A roguelike you escape by editing the JavaScript that builds each level, which is considerably more forgiving than it sounds.
- 10 min
- Desktop
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Escape Rooms: questions
How many sites are in Escape Rooms?
12 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
12 of the 12 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
3 of 12 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 12 are safe for work and 11 work with the sound off.