Aus Versehen Apokalypse

Directly before playing this room we played "2141: The Future of the World" and the story of it was something along the lines: "You will be on a spaceship that is governed by an artificial intelligence". As a great Portal fan (a video game series), hearing that made me enthusiastic about the idea that it may be GLaDOS - the same artificial intelligence that played a major role in Portal. Unfortunately, my wishful thinking was maybe too optimistic. However, here we heard a very similar story that: "You will be in a nuclear plant that is governed by artificial intelligence". Imagine my delight when I've heard GLaDOS voice speaking to us right after we entered the game 🥰. Moreover, it was not only its voice, but the game was literally filled with jokes that sounded exactly as they were created by authors of Portal. I was very overjoyed by this fact and I think that these references were made very well.

However, our experience was completely ruined by the worst Game Master I've ever encountered in my 370 rooms experience. The game was going fine for us, we solved around 80% of riddles within the first half an hour, but then got stuck. We didn't have any idea on what we could do and started requesting hints after some time. However, the hints were somehow completely useless to us and we ended up not solving absolutely anything during the second half of the game. And so our time has ended and GM walked into the room, said that we unfortunately didn't make it and tried to direct us straight to the lobby. However, we of course wanted to know what we were supposed to do in order to progress, so we asked about that. GM tried to show us what we were supposed to do, but she tried to use clearly wrong components in order to solve a puzzle and we quickly realized that she has no idea what to do. When we explained to her why that won't work she apologized to us and admitted that she did not play this room and does not know it very well. We were supposed to play the second game at this venue and she told us that after that, another GM will come and will explain to us what we should have done. And indeed we managed to talk with another GM after the second game and it turned out that we had a malfunction during our game and some boxes that were supposed to open just didn't open effectively blocking us from progressing at all. And our GM wasn't even aware that something malfunctioned!!! Probably the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened to me in an escape room - that is a refund-level experience, but needless to say, we were of course charged the full amount. At least she was nice to us, but was clearly not competent enough to be a game master for this room and I have a feeling that after playing it and talking with the second GM, I would already be a better GM than her.

The room itself is quite nice. I already raved about great Portal references, however even if you don't know Portal, it is still a good game filled with a lot of puzzles on the difficult end. There were definitely some cool puzzles in it and they were the strongest side of this game. Set design was not impressive, but was still decent. There is a side task in this room that has to be quickly completed multiple times. Such idea alone has a good potential and could be executed well, but the punishment for failing at it sucks - you are just losing 5 minutes from your playtime - completely not fun solution, especially when you are running our of time. Too bad that a good game can be ruined so much by a poor GM.

In my new rating scale that I decided to adapt (1-horrible, 2-ok, possibly flawed, 3-good, worth doing, 4-very good, 5-extraordinary) I grade this at:
Set design, ambience, production value: 2
Puzzles: 4
Something original: 3
Did I have fun?: 2