There are plenty of manga about a boy and a girl growing closer, but I only know of one where the relationship centers around escape games—Watashi to Dasshutsu Shimasenka, or Won’t You Escape with Me?

A school boy named Tsunami Kousuke has a problem where people think he’s a creep because he tends to think about and analyze things very quietly and intensely, creating all sorts of misunderstandings. One day, he finds a mysterious school notebook with a code on the front, and after cracking it, realizes that it’s from the meek girl who sits next to him in class, Tojino Aika. It turns out that she’s obsessed with puzzles, and she left that notebook around to see who could be her partner in tackling her favorite type of challenge: escape games. She loves them not just for the problem-solving but also the atmosphere, even being willing to play the damsel just to add to the flavor.

Aika is what I refer to as a “safe yandere”: a character with the intense, obsessive look of a yandere, but targeted at something harmless or only indirectly related to people. She has a very magnetic design and personality as a result, somewhat reminiscent of one of my favorite girls, Hanayo from Love Live! Even skimming the manga can be entertaining, as you get to see all sorts of fun expressions from Aika.

If you can/do read it, though, all the puzzles are meant to be solvable by the reader to a certain degree. Unfortunately, knowing Japanese decently is not enough. I’ve done escape games, and I can read Japanese well enough to understand what’s going on, but I don’t think I could solve these puzzles on my own. There’s a certain degree of familiarity one has to have with a language to begin to decode some of the abstract requirements of the puzzles, and that’s simply not where I am. It’s like why I can never figure out the answers to Professor Agasa’s puns in Detective Conan.

While some series based on similar premises might have the characters progress towards tournaments or something else shounen-like, I don’t think that’s what’ll happen here. Rather, comparable series would be something like Dagashi Kashi or Mysterious Girlfriend X: Boy-girl bonding centered around a specific gimmick. If you like it, you like it.

Four collected volumes are currently out, and I wonder what kind of readership it has built up. Whatever the future of this series might be, though, I actually think it would make for a really good anime. The three-dimensional spaces and the sense of urgency could translate well to animation, and I think Aika herself would be a very popular character.