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Escape room: Into the Dark (Crate Escape)
Oct. 11th, 2019 09:17 amThe Chronotech A.I. Sophie has mysteriously gone off-line, taking a whole support crew with her. You are the next repair crew, tasked with fixing Sophie. You have sixty minutes to do so before her meltdown endangers the entire world - and, because her control chamber is now flooded with deadly photonic radiation, you must do everything in total darkness…
This is my new favourite escape room: a high concept, carried through in all the puzzles, plus a fabulous twist and a solid ending. Rotofobia’s Hell’s Kitchen and Xcape’s The Asylum were scarier, and Hell’s Kitchen still has the edge as the most atmospheric, but the lack of resolution to the frame story did undercut some of the joy of solving it; Into the Dark really sells its conclusion.
To start we were all assigned a role in the Chronotech crew, given an ID card, shown a well-acted but not terribly helpful briefing, and then blindfolded with blacked-out ski masks before being sent in. You have no idea of the dimensions or contents of the room. There’s no radio or walkie talkie, or a hint system (or at least not like that I’ve seen in some other rooms; Sophie did give us one hint), and there’s no countdown (nor can you see your watch!), all of which increase the tension. It also got extremely hot during our time there, which I gather wasn’t entirely intentional.
( Spoiler for one event, no details; but avoid if you want to play this. )
We got out in 48 minutes. It’s a new room, and only about 20 teams have done it so far; we were in the top ten of finishers. They’re still fine-tuning it, though - while we were waiting to go in a guy came out with a drill ((“just clearing away the previous team”) and we were the first team to test the new final puzzle. The staff were very keen to hear about our experience, and took us back in to go over one of the puzzles that we had in fact totally fluked. Great staff, great room, and an excellent story.
This is my new favourite escape room: a high concept, carried through in all the puzzles, plus a fabulous twist and a solid ending. Rotofobia’s Hell’s Kitchen and Xcape’s The Asylum were scarier, and Hell’s Kitchen still has the edge as the most atmospheric, but the lack of resolution to the frame story did undercut some of the joy of solving it; Into the Dark really sells its conclusion.
To start we were all assigned a role in the Chronotech crew, given an ID card, shown a well-acted but not terribly helpful briefing, and then blindfolded with blacked-out ski masks before being sent in. You have no idea of the dimensions or contents of the room. There’s no radio or walkie talkie, or a hint system (or at least not like that I’ve seen in some other rooms; Sophie did give us one hint), and there’s no countdown (nor can you see your watch!), all of which increase the tension. It also got extremely hot during our time there, which I gather wasn’t entirely intentional.
( Spoiler for one event, no details; but avoid if you want to play this. )
We got out in 48 minutes. It’s a new room, and only about 20 teams have done it so far; we were in the top ten of finishers. They’re still fine-tuning it, though - while we were waiting to go in a guy came out with a drill ((“just clearing away the previous team”) and we were the first team to test the new final puzzle. The staff were very keen to hear about our experience, and took us back in to go over one of the puzzles that we had in fact totally fluked. Great staff, great room, and an excellent story.
