If you're not aware of what a "Mystery Room" is, it is an extremely fun and challenging puzzle game where you are physically locked in a room with your friends and you have to solve all sort of clues like riddles, ciphers, codes, encryptions etc. which will lead to the next clue and so on until you get out of that room. It's all about team work. Victoria Concordia Crescit :)
Two years ago, my friends and I, all hardcore gaming geeks, went to "Mystery Rooms" here in KP and tried out the "Hurt Locker" package. I blogged about this incident here. It was an extremely fun event and we managed to escape from the room in the very last minute!
Last week, we had some visiting consultants in office from the US and we all decided to participate in a session of "Mystery Rooms" again.
The package we went for this time was "LOCKOUT - The Prison Break Challenge".
You and your friends had been wrongly convicted of a crime you didn't commit and imprisoned for life. As it is National Day, the Jail warden and all the other jailors are out celebrating for an hour. You have exactly one hour to escape from the Jail before they come back!
Ooooh. Such an intriguing plotline indeed.
What made this experience even more fun was because of our two visiting consultants, who are legends in the gaming world. There's Dave Rohrl, who had more than 25 years experience in the gaming industry. Some of you who played "Plants versus Zombies" might know of that "Crazy Dave" character who kept popping up on the screen... that character was based on him!
And then there's Jenna Miller who had worked at leading Gaming companies like EA, Glu, Zynga, TinyCo, Digital Chocolate, Playdom and GarageGames and was recently the lead designer of "Farmville 2".
Now I'm not going to lie. We had a very impressive team line-up, and with my buddies Roshan and Hackr joining us as well, we were sure to crack the case. But unfortunately... we failed. We reached till the very last clue that would have given us the key to escape, but we were unable to solve that in time. :(
To be fair though, we did perform quite well, solving most of the difficult puzzles quickly, but we wasted a lot of time trying to fetch the bloody key to our jail cells that had, unfortunately for us, dropped and bounced too far beyond our reach. Jenna had to improvise and used our Jail mattress to retract the key, which I'm sure wasn't a part of the plan :D
Other than that, I am not going to reveal anything else that we did in the Jail, as it would be a spoiler for those looking forward to try this. Trust me, you won't regret it, do go for this really challenging package.
One thing I'll mention though, I really love how we were made to role-play the part of the game. As soon as the game started, we were told to wear our Prison uniforms and handcuffed. And then the "Jailors" shouted at us and abused us, ordering us to standing in line and look down as we were marched into our cells. We all played our role to perfection. And the game started from there onwards. Great time indeed.
Here is us after we failed to escape.
Still, what mattered was the amount of fun we all had. So in case any of you have never been to a Mystery Room (or sometimes called Escape Rooms), do gather your friends and try to solve the puzzles. Great time pass too.
Cheers for now.
