Room escape
We did a room escape thing and I completely forgot to write about it!
While my brother was over to visit, we booked ourselves and some of Whitney's extended family living nearby into the bluntly-titled Trapped in a Room with a Zombie, which is a Flash room escape game brought to life. It's held in a slightly dodgy old industrial building somewhere in the depths of Charlestown (although at the time of writing, it seems that they're moving).
When you arrive, you're put in a group of up to about twelve people and have to choose one of the hundreds of name tags stuck to the wall of the entrance room to decide what name you'd like to be referred to by. I found one that said "Hi, I'm the Doctor", while Quadralien surpassed everyone by somehow managing to find one that said San.
After a safety talk and a chance to meet the other people you'll be escaping with, you're led into the room, which contains a collection of drawers and cabinets, an 'Omnipotent' whose role is to steer you in the right direction and prevent you from damaging anything if you're on the wrong track, and a notable lack of zombie. It's only after the door has been locked behind you and you're confusedly glancing around the room that the cupboard at the other end of the room bursts open, revealing an actor in grotesque makeup chained to the inside and frightening everyone to bits.
We went in with a plan of splitting up and searching around then having sort of scrum meetings every three minutes to discuss what we'd found, but that went out the window fairly quickly as everyone frantically found and tried to solve bits of the puzzle at once - I won't talk about the details of any of the puzzles here, but true to the online games, the room starts with a collection of apparently unrelated puzzles that eventually come together to form a final combination that you need to open the door.
I had thought that the zombie would be off in a corner somewhere - I knew his chain was going to lengthen a little every five minutes as the game went on - but he's really a threat to you from the very start and you have to work out how to keep him distracted while people creep to his side of the room to pick things up or unlock drawers. After some coaxing him as if he were a cat, someone worked out that banging on the tables at our end of the room attracted him, and most excursions to the other side of the room from then on were accompanied by a protective samba drumbeat. Quadralien, in a stroke of absolute genius, put a toy fishing rod from a puzzle and a torn-off bloodied sleeve prop together to create a flesh-baited zombie distraction device - after the game was over I asked the organizers if that had been the intended use, and they said it hadn't but they had been so impressed with it that they'd just gone with it.
When you're touched by the zombie, you're considered infected and/or eaten and have to stay on the wall of the room from then on but can still shout advice (which didn't really make a difference to us as we were all cowering on the far wall very quickly). Someone skidded on the interlocking plastic tiles on the floor during a frantic escape from the zombie, which worked to our advantage as he would spend a few precious seconds repairing the floor every time he lunged forwards from then on.
Eventually, with about four minutes left, I somehow ended up perched on one leg balanced on a footstool with the zombie chewing at its feet at about the same moment that we realized other puzzles had given us clues for the final combination we needed, and so I was clinging on to a lock with card suits on it shouting for people to give me the bits of the combination as they looked them up... and the wave of relief and cheering when I pulled down on that lock and it snicked open was the most amazing feeling I've had in a long time.
So I'd recommend it to everyone - we've got to wait for them to re-open with a new puzzle here, and we're doing a different one when we go to Germany this winter!
While my brother was over to visit, we booked ourselves and some of Whitney's extended family living nearby into the bluntly-titled Trapped in a Room with a Zombie, which is a Flash room escape game brought to life. It's held in a slightly dodgy old industrial building somewhere in the depths of Charlestown (although at the time of writing, it seems that they're moving).
When you arrive, you're put in a group of up to about twelve people and have to choose one of the hundreds of name tags stuck to the wall of the entrance room to decide what name you'd like to be referred to by. I found one that said "Hi, I'm the Doctor", while Quadralien surpassed everyone by somehow managing to find one that said San.
After a safety talk and a chance to meet the other people you'll be escaping with, you're led into the room, which contains a collection of drawers and cabinets, an 'Omnipotent' whose role is to steer you in the right direction and prevent you from damaging anything if you're on the wrong track, and a notable lack of zombie. It's only after the door has been locked behind you and you're confusedly glancing around the room that the cupboard at the other end of the room bursts open, revealing an actor in grotesque makeup chained to the inside and frightening everyone to bits.
We went in with a plan of splitting up and searching around then having sort of scrum meetings every three minutes to discuss what we'd found, but that went out the window fairly quickly as everyone frantically found and tried to solve bits of the puzzle at once - I won't talk about the details of any of the puzzles here, but true to the online games, the room starts with a collection of apparently unrelated puzzles that eventually come together to form a final combination that you need to open the door.
I had thought that the zombie would be off in a corner somewhere - I knew his chain was going to lengthen a little every five minutes as the game went on - but he's really a threat to you from the very start and you have to work out how to keep him distracted while people creep to his side of the room to pick things up or unlock drawers. After some coaxing him as if he were a cat, someone worked out that banging on the tables at our end of the room attracted him, and most excursions to the other side of the room from then on were accompanied by a protective samba drumbeat. Quadralien, in a stroke of absolute genius, put a toy fishing rod from a puzzle and a torn-off bloodied sleeve prop together to create a flesh-baited zombie distraction device - after the game was over I asked the organizers if that had been the intended use, and they said it hadn't but they had been so impressed with it that they'd just gone with it.
When you're touched by the zombie, you're considered infected and/or eaten and have to stay on the wall of the room from then on but can still shout advice (which didn't really make a difference to us as we were all cowering on the far wall very quickly). Someone skidded on the interlocking plastic tiles on the floor during a frantic escape from the zombie, which worked to our advantage as he would spend a few precious seconds repairing the floor every time he lunged forwards from then on.
Eventually, with about four minutes left, I somehow ended up perched on one leg balanced on a footstool with the zombie chewing at its feet at about the same moment that we realized other puzzles had given us clues for the final combination we needed, and so I was clinging on to a lock with card suits on it shouting for people to give me the bits of the combination as they looked them up... and the wave of relief and cheering when I pulled down on that lock and it snicked open was the most amazing feeling I've had in a long time.
So I'd recommend it to everyone - we've got to wait for them to re-open with a new puzzle here, and we're doing a different one when we go to Germany this winter!