What if I use the match to melt the door?
But, people are taking this genre to another step by making it real life! You will actually be locked in a room and you have to figure your escape! This is the newest fad that is sweeping across Malaysia and one of the Gamerooms what delivers this is Break The Code. I went to the place in Belissa Row, Penang to check it out and played 2 of their rooms with my friends. Here is my review of Break The Code: Real Room Escape
NOTE: NO SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW
So I picked the room "Crazy Lab: The Undead Zombie". Story is there is an epidemic and the entire human race is infected I must go into the lab to go find the antidote. The people who worked there were very nice and we got started with the game fairly quick. They led us into a room and told us that we had 1 hour to escape this room. There was a bell that we could ring twice only if we got stuck and they would come to provide us clues. Simple enough.
My Psycho-Kinetic Energy Reader is peaking!
Then he closed the door and the clock started to tick. First thing we did was frantically flip over everything that is in the room. One we had the pieces we tried to figure out how they will help us go to the next room. Since most of the obstacles are blocked by numbered padlocks, the puzzles all revolved around figuring the correct code. We eventually got to the last room but the time ran out. Guess we lost!
But throughout the game, although it was fun to work as a team to try and solve puzzles and in turn feel excited once we solved one. The number puzzles appearing over and over again felt stale after awhile. The atmosphere was uninspiring. It felt like they'd just filled up the room with stuff they bought from a Halloween shop. The posters for this room gave us the idea the rooms was scary but actually playing it? The rooms did not manage startle us any one bit. The theme "Crazy Lab" was immediately forgotten once we started solving the puzzles.
But I thought there were gonna be zombies :(
A few of the puzzles themselves were problematic. We found a way to cheat around one of the puzzles. Think being able to break the puzzle is fun? It is not, trust me. It felt like the person created this was careless rather than me being smart. The puzzles don't fit the theme well and were pretty much just there because the designers wanted you to solve a puzzle and go to the next room. Perhaps if they had a puzzle that was, oh I don't know, created by the Lab's Professor and in it contains the formula for the antidote and only I can solve it because I am the only one he could trust? Then the whole game would have been much enjoyable.
The puzzles were of varying difficulty, but they did not tapper the difficulty accordingly. It felt weird that after we spent 15 minutes of mathematical mind breaking to solve one puzzle, the next one that followed took us only 1 minute.
When I left the Game-room, I was not thinking about how exciting it was or how smart the puzzles were. But instead I was thinking of whether all that was worth my RM 35.
Final Verdict: It was very average. Could have been done better. It was fun just because it was something new. Fun rating, I'd give it a 2/5.
Would I Recommend?: Only if you are with a group of friends and you want to do something different for fun. If you wanted to play puzzle games you might as well go play better escape rooms on the internet for free.
