A beautifully crafted room with a strong theme and engaging puzzles, let down a little by the linearity of the game.
Rating: | ★★★ (Recommended) |
Location: | London |
Team: | AMPDG |
Date: | 20 October 2021 |
Hints taken: | 1 |
Time: | 1h27m13s (of 1h40m) |
URL: | AI Escape |
Front & Briefing
Archimedes Inspiration’s location is a good traditional one – tucked away alongside a building site in a converted biscuit factory, now mostly office space. The booking confirmation had excellent instructions and maps on how to find them; the only stumbling block we came across was that the area has gated access from the North side, but our host was able to come out and let us in!
The waiting area was large and a large TV screen presentation showed us the basic gameplay and safety blerb while the GM was doing the final resets before we started. It also showed a big photo of the team with the fastest time so far, if that’s something you aspire to! The website promised us a strong narrative, and this started early, with the GM taking a group photo of us, with an astronaut helmet, about to board our ship, then leading us into the room with our eyes closed and a secret to solve. Always exciting!
Theme
We were promised a spaceship and we got a spaceship! This felt like a high budget build, with electronics everywhere and very few obvious build artefacts. The theme was carried everywhere, with nothing feeling out of place. There were some nice surprises and a lot of the tools we were given were just plain fun to operate.
The room was big on narrative, which both needed to be broadly understood to figure out some of the puzzles, and had some extra bits and pieces thrown in for flavour too. The latter half of the game in particular had some nice extra touches which I enjoyed.
Puzzles
As advertised, Project Delta goes further than the average escape room in terms of the amount of figuring out you have to do, and it largely isn’t signposted too. Everything logically fits together so it didn’t feel unfair; in fact it felt rewarding and immersive to have to tune into the surroundings. One puzzle I struggled with personally before a teammate figured it out definitely felt like all the information was there, I was just missing a crucial bit of information. So a full thumbs-up on the puzzle difficulty. Have a coffee beforehand!
A couple of the puzzles suffered a little bit from a long feedback time between the player action and the confirmation or otherwise of the room. This felt more like a technical issue than artificial difficulty; the room relied quite heavily on various bits of wireless magic and the lag made those parts way more challenging than they should have been.
The puzzle flow was very linear (the intro video even mentions this) which was just about acceptable for my team of three people, where our combined brainpower was often needed, I think for a team of five this could quite easily lead to people hanging around not being able to contribute (some puzzles definitely didn’t have room for five people to crowd around). There was one section that needed the physicality of all three of us, but aside from that, a single person could go through this room if they had their wits about them. Even some more things like needing simultaneous across-the-room button presses in more places might have made this less of a problem.
Hint system
Hints were delivered by the GM via an iPad. We didn’t request any directly, but the GM noticed us struggling at one point and asked if we needed a hint, which we took. It was a good hint too; not solving the problem but enough of a pointer to make some things click in our heads and send us in the right direction.
The time remaining was also displayed on the iPad.
Finale
There wasn’t a big finale, but there was a strong sense of progression through the room as a whole. I found myself not being really sure at what point we were going to reach the end until we were actually standing back in the corridor again. In retrospect a few things were signalled.
Debriefing
Our GM was very keen to take us through the narrative of the room afterwards, checking that we’d understood all the plot points and so on. She also showed us some of the remote systems on her iPad that she could use to manually trigger or reset various puzzles. I don’t think I’ve ever been shown this unprompted before by a GM and I found it interesting, though as one of my teammates put it, the vibe we got was “look at how clever this room is!” rather than “your team did great at solving this!”, which isn’t necessarily what you want after 90 minutes of puzzle solving.