Escape Room Reviews: Witchcraft / Room 1313

Company: Escape Hotel Hollywood
Room: Witchcraft
Date Played: 9/11/16
Player Count: 4, just barely!
Success:  Our most severe loss ever.

Premise: I think it’s that the townsfolk assume anyone who stays in hotel room 1313 is a witch, so they show up every ninety minutes or so and burn the occupants alive.

Immersion: I don’t know. It was pretty dark in there, so I guess that’s accurate to being indoors in the 1600s? A lot of the knick-knacks still had price tags on. I think we were expecting a game about witchcraft to feature magical objects pretty heavily, but this room had a ton of regular physical locks.

Highlights: The lobby procedure is the most involved and fancy of any company I’ve visited, and the passports are neat. 

Lowlights: First off, the low light. A ton of this room hinges on not being able to spot things easily because it's not your turn with the 'good' candle.

One piece of tech seemed to not be working. Calling for a hint either allowed the Keeper to bypass it for us, or it coincidentally suddenly started working again at that time. 

Our team suffered a massive failure of communication on this room for some reason. There's a huge red herring that completely snookered 3/4ths of our group, and left me feeling like I was playing alone as I collected a massive amount of other clues. Where I screwed up was in trying to get other members of the team to do the grunt work on one of the  puzzles for me (which made sense to me because it used an item they were familiar with and I had not examined) and instead nobody ever worked on it. 

Does the room have a rock with weird symbols painted on it that the GM later says isn't relevant to the game hidden anywhere: Yes, and it's really out of the way. I bet a lot of people don't find it. 

And Finally:   I think a lot about what it actually means when a company lists the difficulty of a room on their website. Difficult for who? The internet gives me the impression that most players in an escape room are playing their first room. Are the ratings different for "enthusiasts"? Where does ten rooms put me on the bell curve of player experience?  This room was rated ★★★★★ for difficulty on the Escape Hotel website, and maybe it earned that rating by wielding conventions against its players. Setting patterns and then breaking them in a kind of meta-puzzle. Or maybe it's just an overpriced escape room.  I think it will be a long time before I fill my passport with stamps for the other rooms. 

Out of 9 rooms played, I'm ranking this one #8. 

How to book this room yourself: Visit http://www.escapehotelhollywood.com/tracks/6/witchcraft

iOS 10 == v. bad

I installed iOS 10 the other day, and today I reverted back to 9. 

I started to write a long screed about how many extra taps and swipes it takes to do everything, maybe post that anecdote about Jobs getting mad at not being able to find any song on an iPod in three clicks.

But I guess that's not really what I want to post. I don't want to be 'all get off my lawn' about this. I tested and then opted out of the latest OS X version as well. It just comes down to both of them taking existing workflows and breaking them, or making them more difficult, without any obvious benefits in exchange.

Maybe iOS 10 makes sense if you have 3D touch, which my iPhone 6 does not. That's why I'm going to stick with a version of the software that was intended for my hardware, instead of a version that compromises in order to run on my hardware. 

(Seriously though, what's Apple's interest in driving users to night shift?)

ETA: It occurs to me that my casual dislike of 10 is also going to quash my pipedream of picking up an iPhone 6SE.  Here's hoping there's a 7SE next year...

Set List: The Ides of September

The 15th of September always reminds me of a little poem I know...

Remember, remember, the ides of September, 
stab stab stab stab stab stab stab stab!
stab! stab! stab! stab! stab! stab! stab! 
stabstabstabstabstabstabstabstab
stab stab stab—

It's actually kind of a long poem, now that I think of it...

 

Escape Room Reviews: Mystery of the Red Dragon

Company: Amazing Escape Room Los Angeles
Room: Mystery of the Red Dragon
Date Played: 9/4/16
Player Count: 2, plus another group of 5!
Success:  Success! With unwanted hints.

Premise: As INTERPOL agents, it is our duty to steal a priceless statue from an art thief!

Immersion: The vibe was somewhat like a carnival or kids game show. This room is not plausibly the home or hideout of an old thief. 

Highlights: The room is packed with stuff to do. There’s a nice blend of conceptual and mechanical puzzles, and tons of physical locks. There’s a system that made me feel a little bit like we were earning points as we progressed, which was unusual but fun. 

The hint system was text delivered via monitors on the walls, which is accompanied by a noise taken from an educational film strip. I really liked this method of communication.

The video we were shown that outlined the rules was well produced. 

Lowlights: The booking website is not as clear as at some other games around town, and we would never have signed up for this game if we knew there was already a group of 5 playing. They were a sharp bunch, and totally prepared to steamroll any pair of gooves that they got stuck with. Maybe on a different day I could have sat back a little more and enjoyed watching how other people solve a room, but instead I felt like I had to battle to participate. There were things in this game which I don’t know where they came from, I don’t know how they were used, and I don’t know what using them did. It made my map* a little bit confusing. 

Our Keeper was like Clippy, offering unwanted advice. I think a perfect GM might provide unsolicited clues in the nick of time to keep the momentum going, but it’s really deflating to get a cluetelling you to focus on, say, a particular lock, while you’re in the act of walking your key across the room to that very lock.

Maybe worst blacklight use we've encountered?  (I'm going to call this not-a-spoiler. Maybe if a room didn't have a black light and I told you, then I'd be spoiling a fun surprise.)

There are buttons for opening doors that you are supposed to use that look exactly like the buttons on the emergency exit doors that end the game if you use them. This is bad design.

And Finally: Joining the other team was educational, at least. I think I scratch my puzzle-solving itch by grokking the solutions more than by physically turning the keys in the locks, but I found myself racing to be the one to turn the keys here just so that I could be the first to see what was inside a locked cabinet or drawer. Our group was so spread out (even in the small space) that the people who were calling out their discoveries weren’t hearing each other, and sometimes we got stuck on needing an object that another player had put in their pocket 5 minutes ago. 

I would rather understand everything in a room than set the record time. We didn't technically finish The Lab, but it was a more satisfying experience because I know what was going on. I bet there are some games out there for larger groups where this play style just doesn’t work.  

I have a lot of lowlights for this game, so I feel like I should emphasize that reviews are about my own experience. I think the best way for a reviewer to be valuable to a consumer is through a body of work and related experiences. There are film critics I never agree with, and their reviews are just as valuable as if we were peas in a pod, once I know that about them.  I think I would have really enjoyed this room if we'd played it as just a couple, or in our usual team of 4.  Such as it is, out of 8 rooms played, I'm rating this one #7.

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://amazingescaperoom.com/la-northridge/mystery-of-the-red-dragon/

*Obviously, I go home and draw a complete map of every escape room I play, with annotations for the objects, locations of the collectibles, notes about the flow of play and solutions. Obviously.

Movie tropes vs. women?

My close, personal friend Luke was watching Stranger Things recently and found himself off-put by the townsfolk's response to Winona Ryder's character, treating her perhaps like a crazy person just because she was saying things that sound crazy. He felt this way, in part, I suspect, because it seemed like lousy trope to him that nobody ever believes the hysterical woman who, it turns out later, knew exactly what was up and tried to warn everyone.  He was looking for more examples of this. I responded thusly.  Like my previous post about a movie trope, you may find it spoilerish.

People mostly humor the moms in The Exorcist and The Orphanage, because they're being paid to do so, but the husband in The Orphanage thinks she's nuts for free. 

Sarah Connor gets locked up for talking about Judgement Day. Everyone assumes the mom in Lights Out is loony and talking to herself instead of a monster. Nobody believes Marcia Gay Harden in The Mist, and they're right not to, although there are dire consequences either way. I'm sure in some Nightmare on Elm St. entries the parents and police and doctors figure these girls will calm down after they get some rest. 

[Guy who posted earlier in the comments] Adam might mean the most recent remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or could be describing Jolie in Changeling, but in those movies the authorities DO believe the women, they just don't say so because they're in on the conspiracy.

The people around the main character in It Follows don't get what's going on at first, but that's closer to the heart of the trope - it's the same as investigating a weird noise in your basement. WE know that because this is a horror movie, hey don't do that. But, when the movie is over and there's a weird noise in your basement, you're going to go check on the cat or whatever because you think you live in a world without Terminators and creepy psychic children, just like the characters did at the start of most of these movies.

Well, the appearance of realism is half of it. The other half is moving these characters to action once they see that there's no authority figure who's going to act for them. That part applies to most of the above folks, moreso the more that they're protagonists. The cops don't believe Peter Parker in ASM, or the kid in Gremlins, or Cary Grant in North by Northwest, or Liam Neeson in Non-Stop, or Coraline in Coraline. But only some of this group is because they sound crazy. Others are suspected of being drunk!

My point may have been that I think you'll find it happening to a woman in most any horror and/or fantasy where a woman is the lead.

The reason I'm reposting this here is mostly because I thought it might lead to interesting conversation. But also, the silence this post earned me on Facebook got me all paranoid that we weren't really talking about movies and I came across like someone's tone-deaf, racist uncle. Internet!