Escape Room Reviews: The Clockwork Caper

Company: Perplexity Games
Room: The Clockwork Caper
Location: Cleveland, OH
Date Played: 12/27/17
Player Count: 3
Success:  Unprecedented success!

Premise: Sneak into the lab of inventor Patrick O'Malley and discover the secrets of his new machine for your boss, Thomas Edison!

Immersion: The production design of the room looks a little bit thrown together, but if anything, it's probably too clean for a real inventor's workshop.  

Highlights: We supposedly set a speed record and impressed our GM with how quickly we escaped. (I have this theory that the Escape Room GM Handbook tells you to tell every group how uncommonly smart, speedy, and handsome your team is, and if necessary how you came *this close* to solving it!) 

The non-linear design let our group split up and to each work with separate puzzles.

Lowlights: 
This room feels very short. By my reckoning, and by reckoning I mean carefully-drawn-after-the-fact map of the room, The Clockwork Caper has about half as many items / points of interest as almost any other game i've played. I was definitely surprised that the ending was, in fact, the ending.

There were a couple of mechanical puzzles that we probably solved more through brute force than actually understanding the underlying systems. 

And Finally:   What really drew me to this game was that the rooms seemed to be designed to have a connection to Cleveland history. There was a moment in the end game that really missed out on the chance to drive that connection home. 

We felt good about ourselves for cruising through a room, but unsatisfied with the experience overall, leading to my first time playing 2 rooms in one day.  Out of 14 games played, I would rank this one #10.

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.perplexitygames.com

#2,304: Moonlight

Diani and Devine Meet the Apocalypse - ★★★★★
I've seen this movie countless times in the course of making it, but I'm logging a screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival, one of two festivals that premiered the movie within days of each other.

In my own, utterly biased opinion, this is the best feature I've worked on in any way. It's so nigh-on impossible to find a project that you can really believe in, and even if you do, the odds of it turning out good are so very slim. But here we are, and somehow, watching for the umpteenth time but for the first time with a full theater of mostly strangers, I still enjoyed watching the movie. It's a hard thing to explain to someone who hasn't run this particular gauntlet, but that never happens.

There're jokes, there're adorable pets, there's serious stuff that I think is great, and there's kind of a grim truth underneath it all that I can relate to. I mean, what if the world DID end tomorrow? Sure, the part where the world ends would be tough, but at least then if I don't "make it" in showbiz it's not really my fault, right?

It played great with the crowd and we even picked up an audience award. I hope you get to see it.

Where to Invade Next - ★★½☆☆
Starts off so goofy that you want to turn it off, but eventually it calms down until it gets so dull that you want to turn it off.

The Accountant - ★★★½☆
I liked this one. I was interested in the characters and the world, not least because of how they avoided a long heavy blast of exposition in the beginning. I thought that was great, so it's kind of a drag when they give it to you anyway later on. The third act is unsatisfying in the way that Luke Cage is unsatisfying - the world is too small.

ARQ - ★★½☆☆
Live, Die, Repeat.

Moonlight - ★★★★☆
When I'm watching stand-ups, especially open mic'ers, especially the bad ones, I always hold out this little hope that it's all just an act, and we're in the capable hands of someone who has thought their art through. It's virtually never the case, of course, but I am an optimist.

What I liked about this movie was that I had zero idea of what it was going in, and that the filmmakers seemed to know what they were doing. It's a little rough around the edges, it feels more indie and homemade than anything else I've seen lately, and it's not perfect, but it works, and maybe most importantly, it feels like the movie the filmmakers wanted to make.

Also, I always see the girl from Guardians of the Galaxy in the poster.

View fullsize

Escape Room Reviews: Titanic

Special note: we were beta testers for this room, which was not yet open to the public at the time that we played. 

Company: 60
Date Played: 9/22/16
Player Count: 2, which is enough
Success:  Success!
Premise: It’s the Titanic. Pretty much all it does is sink. Get out of there!

Immersion: At the beginning of the game, things felt very urgent indeed, but that feeling fades fairly quickly.  The set is very nice, although a couple of items seemed a little anachronistic (and may have been replaced after the beta test). The background screams of drowning passengers started to sound like people enjoying a roller coaster after a little while. 

Highlights: The fun factor on this room is really high.  As I mention with every review of a 60 Out room, they're tops at magical objects, but the non-magic puzzles are also pretty clever. Although there are a couple of standard locks, a lot of what this room has to offer is much more tactile and involving. 

Lowlights: As with the Ghost Ship, we got really stuck on something fairly early where we had the right idea, but the thing we wanted to do didn't seem possible. We got past it eventually, but not without a) asking for a hint that didn't help because we already worked out what we thought the thing did, and b) applying WAY more force than I would have thought necessary. 

Some of the props were a little subpar or even broken for a room that isn't subject to public consumption yet, but I'm confident that all of those issues will be sorted out by the time the room is open to the world. 

And Finally:   Hey, this was the second time in two days that we found a [XXX] in a [XXX] on a [XXX] in a room by 60 Out!

If I were clicking around on a company's website, trying to pick a room to play, I think it would have been a long time before I settled in on a Titanic-themed room, but the fact is that this is my favorite 60 Out room to date.  In contrast to Ghost Ship, this room has an unusually low amount of things, but they are used in ways that are mostly more concrete and satisfying.

Out of 13 escape rooms played, I'm going to rank this one #4. 

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.60out.com/rooms/titanic

Escape Room Reviews: Ghost Ship

Special note: we were beta testers for this room, which was not yet open to the public at the time that we played. 

Company: 60 Out Escape Rooms
Room: Ghost Ship
Date Played: 9/21/16
Player Count: 2, which is not enough
Success:  Success! …eventually!

Premise: You’re in the hold of the ship of… ghost pirates? You need to escape and break that spell!

Immersion: It's very ship-like! Really great looking wooden construction abounds. There were a couple of objects that I don't know what they were supposed to be in-fiction or out, but that's more of fridge-logic than anything to think about in the moment.

Highlights: This room is huge!  It might not by physically larger than The Lab, but I've never seen a room with this much stuff to do. Most rooms I've played have roughly 25 things*, and this is a room with over 40. 

Some very cool magic objects - this is the top company for magic objects. 

Lowlights: Not every magic object was entirely functional on our playthrough - again, it was a beta test, and the purpose of testing is to work out the bugs, so I don't hold this against them or expect that you'll encounter the same. But still - sometimes we had to have GMs come in to fix things.

We got really stuck on a puzzle where we tried the correct solution right away but for some reason it didn't work, so we ruled it out as an option.  Wasting so much time fruitlessly knocking our heads against this particular wall was bad for morale.

And Finally:   This room reminded me in a few ways of the other 60 Out room I've played, Senator Payne. The first half is mostly physical interactions with ordinary objects, which I found more satisfying than the second half.  

Playing this game as a couple (our GM said the recommended group size would be 6-8) and as testers, it took us almost exactly 80 minutes to escape, and I think I was somewhat escape-room-fatigued by the end of it. With a proper group working out the non-linear segments as a team, and the room itself firing on all cylinders, Ghost Ship would be an excellent room for a medium or large-sized team.

Out of an even dozen escape rooms played, I'm ranking this one #5

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.60out.com/rooms/ghost-ship

*Things, in this case, are objects you can interact with: clues, keys, locks, points of interest, anything I would mark down on my map**

**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.

#2,300: Tickled

Queen of Katwe - ★★★☆☆
Happily, Queen of Katwe is a movie with a family-friendly subject, not a kids movie about a kid who becomes a superstar.

It's a little bit too long, but interesting that they can do a climatic final chess match without explaining to the audience what's really going on in the game.

The Girl on the Train - ★★★☆☆
Better than I was led to believe by the film's reviewers, or indeed, the film's advertisers. The deliberately confusing opening did a lot to keep me interested and engaged. Sure, you can work out whodunnit before the movie tells you, but I can't remember the last time I caught a movie like this in the theater. Gone Girl seems like a lazy comparison.

Kung Fu Elliot - ★★½☆☆
The easy note is to call this Canadian Movie. Feels like it falls more on the mock-doc side of the fence, not least because some of the notes land so perfectly. But, as I often wonder in these situations, does it matter?

I might prefer a version that reveals the story as the filmmakers experienced it. It seems like a weird choice to combine journalism with a big, pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you reveal. I bet that's a big contributor to audiences feeling mistrustful of the film.

Tickled - ★½☆☆☆
Despite how much I heard about tickled, I was still shocked by how boring it is. 15 years ago it might've seemed fresh, but now it seems like nobody involved has ever used the internet before. This would've been better off as a 15-minute segment on Reply All.