Project Avatar: Stalker (Ukraine)
Oct. 17th, 2020 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraForget everything you expect from this game. This is an unusual hybrid of an escape room, video game and movie. Remember to be fast like bunny and watch the time! You have 60 minutes to escape this reality!
#peak2020 is, obviously, being at home and on Zoom at midnight NZ time with another NZer, two Australians, and an American, none of whom I have ever met before, all of us yelling instructions to a guy in the Ukraine (only visible as a pair of gloved hands) who is searching for magical items in a massive booby-trapped warehouse on livestream.
This was fun and frantic and super quirky. There is an overall plot (that doesn’t make a lot of sense), a villain and a helper, items everywhere, puzzles that have to be solved to get high value items, loot boxes that may contain either items or a trap that will take not only one of your three lives but five minutes of your time, an optional egg game that can restore time and lives, and objects that when you examine them trigger cut-scenes that don’t do much other than suck up more time. There is also a crafting bench, which you have to use to create keys as well as high value artifacts; again, it triggers a crafting montage, so after doing the first key we saved the next batch up to do all at once. Your Avatar is cheerfully helpful without overdoing it, and manages to convey a fair bit of personality with just hand gestures.
The first puzzles were fairly obvious but then they got more inventive. I particularly liked the string and measuring stick one. The sheer size of the place was a bit overwhelming - fortunately you can ask for an overlap of a map of your current level, but it was still super easy to get disoriented and I would not recommend this if you are at all prone to motion sickness. We lost five minutes on a trap, and ended in a mad scramble; we crafted everything we had, with about two minutes to go, and then went back to one of the two puzzles we’d been stuck on as I’d had an idea, opened it successfully and risked another loot box. Frustratingly, we were one minor piece short of crafting a 500 point item, but we finished with 2200 points and that was pretty good.
We missed one room, and didn’t solve one of the puzzles we found; we also didn’t try the egg game. I’m curious whether the loot boxes are randomised on replay as if not you could certainly improve your score. However this was towards the more expensive end of these games (understandably, given the cast etc) and I’d prefer to try one of the other episodes; this was episode 2 (at least three of the others had done ep 1, which was a bit more video gamey)
#peak2020 is, obviously, being at home and on Zoom at midnight NZ time with another NZer, two Australians, and an American, none of whom I have ever met before, all of us yelling instructions to a guy in the Ukraine (only visible as a pair of gloved hands) who is searching for magical items in a massive booby-trapped warehouse on livestream.
This was fun and frantic and super quirky. There is an overall plot (that doesn’t make a lot of sense), a villain and a helper, items everywhere, puzzles that have to be solved to get high value items, loot boxes that may contain either items or a trap that will take not only one of your three lives but five minutes of your time, an optional egg game that can restore time and lives, and objects that when you examine them trigger cut-scenes that don’t do much other than suck up more time. There is also a crafting bench, which you have to use to create keys as well as high value artifacts; again, it triggers a crafting montage, so after doing the first key we saved the next batch up to do all at once. Your Avatar is cheerfully helpful without overdoing it, and manages to convey a fair bit of personality with just hand gestures.
The first puzzles were fairly obvious but then they got more inventive. I particularly liked the string and measuring stick one. The sheer size of the place was a bit overwhelming - fortunately you can ask for an overlap of a map of your current level, but it was still super easy to get disoriented and I would not recommend this if you are at all prone to motion sickness. We lost five minutes on a trap, and ended in a mad scramble; we crafted everything we had, with about two minutes to go, and then went back to one of the two puzzles we’d been stuck on as I’d had an idea, opened it successfully and risked another loot box. Frustratingly, we were one minor piece short of crafting a 500 point item, but we finished with 2200 points and that was pretty good.
We missed one room, and didn’t solve one of the puzzles we found; we also didn’t try the egg game. I’m curious whether the loot boxes are randomised on replay as if not you could certainly improve your score. However this was towards the more expensive end of these games (understandably, given the cast etc) and I’d prefer to try one of the other episodes; this was episode 2 (at least three of the others had done ep 1, which was a bit more video gamey)
