Escape Rosecliff Island is a hidden object game where the player takes the role of a castaway stranded on a mysterious and remote island. The main objective is to find and click on all the items from a list at the bottom of the screen, on locations around the island filled with assorted objects, within a time limit. Some of the list items have riddles instead of the object name, like "collects nuts" for a squirrel, "cuts paper" for a pair of scissors, and so on.

The hint button highlights the position of one of the required objects, but takes 7,500 points from the score and about a minute to recharge after use. A relaxed mode, without the time constraints, can be selected at the start of the game.

Besides the list items, each location has two hidden locks. A new mode called "Unlimited Seek & Find" is available at the main menu after completing the game and finding all the fifty locks, where the goal is to find every single item from each location as fast as possible.

The mini-games that appear between the stages are versions of classic casual games. There are implementations of concentration, jigsaw puzzles, circle puzzles, word search and tile-matching titles. In the circle puzzle, a scrambled picture is divided in circular segments, and the objective is to rotate each ring until it is in the correct position. In the tile-matching mini-game, the player has to swap two adjacent tiles in a grid and connect three or more matching figures to make them disappear, breaking the background layer to complete the level.