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cyphomandraThe Future Directions Bureau sent their top agent (code name Fox) on a crucial mission in the 21st century to preserve the timeline. However, Agent Fox has now disappeared from the time stream. Enemy action is suspected - it’s up to you to trace his whereabouts and save the future.
Having booked a live Zoom escape room set in a catacombs in Amsterdam, along with my sister and brother-in-law who are also nowhere near the Netherlands, I got an email an hour or so before our timeslot apologising and saying that due to technical difficulties they would have to postpone, although if we wanted we could still pop over and do it in person. In a fit of frustrated puzzle-based enthusiasm (and lacking a functional teleporter) I then searched the internet for other options and found Next Level Escape’s Temporal Tangle, an on-line escape room with the advantage of not needing a timeslot, and we played that instead.
Next Level Escape is a Sydney company whose rooms I’ve eyed up for some time, partly because of good reviews but mostly because they have a room called Ex Libris where the gimmick is that you’re pulled into a portal between the real world and various books and, well, yes please. I have not yet managed to coordinate any Sydney trips with a free evening and enough people to do the room with, so it was good to get a sneak preview of their style.
For $AU35 you get an ID that allows up to four people to enter the game, which you can play at any time. It is basically playing a video game separately but simultaneously; you might all be in the same room, but you can’t see anyone else or interact with them. The three of us had a conference phone call running on speakerphone (not organised by the game) so we could talk through it. The game itself is an interesting hybrid of reality and video game, in that the rooms are 360 degree renderings of an actual escape room. Objects can be clicked on and, if picked up, examined in a 3D visualiser; there is an odd glitch where if you pick up an object it appears in your inventory but still stays in the environment, which is a bit disconcerting and made one puzzle harder in that you couldn’t tell which of those objects you’d collected.
It is code-heavy but they do work hard at making that on theme; the unlockable containers are memories, and once you have them all there are two more puzzles based on your collection as a whole. Some puzzles translated surprisingly well to the game format (the UV light), while others less so - I found the photos in the dark room very hard to see on my laptop. Reasonable storyline - again, enhanced by having the characters’ voiceovers reading the notes they’d left - and there’s even a choice at the end, once you’ve solved the puzzles, which leads to one of two endings. We took longer as everyone had to solve all the puzzles, but got through with no hints in about eighty minutes.
(the Catacombs are now scheduled for the 28th of June).
Having booked a live Zoom escape room set in a catacombs in Amsterdam, along with my sister and brother-in-law who are also nowhere near the Netherlands, I got an email an hour or so before our timeslot apologising and saying that due to technical difficulties they would have to postpone, although if we wanted we could still pop over and do it in person. In a fit of frustrated puzzle-based enthusiasm (and lacking a functional teleporter) I then searched the internet for other options and found Next Level Escape’s Temporal Tangle, an on-line escape room with the advantage of not needing a timeslot, and we played that instead.
Next Level Escape is a Sydney company whose rooms I’ve eyed up for some time, partly because of good reviews but mostly because they have a room called Ex Libris where the gimmick is that you’re pulled into a portal between the real world and various books and, well, yes please. I have not yet managed to coordinate any Sydney trips with a free evening and enough people to do the room with, so it was good to get a sneak preview of their style.
For $AU35 you get an ID that allows up to four people to enter the game, which you can play at any time. It is basically playing a video game separately but simultaneously; you might all be in the same room, but you can’t see anyone else or interact with them. The three of us had a conference phone call running on speakerphone (not organised by the game) so we could talk through it. The game itself is an interesting hybrid of reality and video game, in that the rooms are 360 degree renderings of an actual escape room. Objects can be clicked on and, if picked up, examined in a 3D visualiser; there is an odd glitch where if you pick up an object it appears in your inventory but still stays in the environment, which is a bit disconcerting and made one puzzle harder in that you couldn’t tell which of those objects you’d collected.
It is code-heavy but they do work hard at making that on theme; the unlockable containers are memories, and once you have them all there are two more puzzles based on your collection as a whole. Some puzzles translated surprisingly well to the game format (the UV light), while others less so - I found the photos in the dark room very hard to see on my laptop. Reasonable storyline - again, enhanced by having the characters’ voiceovers reading the notes they’d left - and there’s even a choice at the end, once you’ve solved the puzzles, which leads to one of two endings. We took longer as everyone had to solve all the puzzles, but got through with no hints in about eighty minutes.
(the Catacombs are now scheduled for the 28th of June).
