Escape Room Reviews: Stuck in Time

Company: Cryptic Escape Rooms
Room: Stuck in Time
Date Played: 4/30/17
Player Count: 6 (2 + 4 strangers)
Success:  Success!

Premise: Your Time Travel-o-Tron shorted out, and you’re stuck in the past. Instead of becoming a wealthy ruler of all you survey, you must solve puzzles to return to the future.

Immersion: There wasn't any to speak of. Nothing seemed like it was truly of the era it was set in. Each part of the game had unnecessary anachronisms (which I can ignore for the good of the game in room escapes set in the miscellaneous past, but they stand out all the more in the room that's about time travel). 

Highlights:

• There were a couple of cool ideas for puzzles that I haven't seen elsewhere.
• We got along well with our team of strangers.
• The location was pretty easy to find for an escape room business.

Lowlights:

• Some of the tech was broken or very finicky for a newish room. It felt like we were beta testing.
• Our tickets were more expensive than the tickets of the people who were in the room with us. (In private rooms, there is sometimes a premium for bringing a smaller group - Cryptic Escape charges this premium even though they do not have private booking.)
• This room contains red herrings.

And Finally:   Despite the premium pricing, this is not a premium room.  The street where this company is located has several other companies, and although I haven't been to any of them, I would recommend giving them a shot first.  Out of 23 games played, I'm slotting this into the list at number 20. 

How to book this room yourself: Visit http://www.escapecryptic.com

#2,345: John Wick 2

Tangerine - ★★★★☆
In that early sit-down scene with the impossible continuity, I thought, "what. What is this?"
But then I loved it. And that's only partially because I like movies that happen in locations I know.

Anthropoid - ★★☆☆☆
A little bit boring movie about the Czech liberationists that couldn't shoot straight.

Logan - ★★★★☆
Obviously the best Wolverine movie, maybe the best X-Men movie. The supporting characters are terrific in a way that X-Men usually isn't (which is a shame in an ensemble). The X-24 parts felt like a little bit of a cheat, - like Passengers, taking the 'easy out' of action instead of going even deeper and darker. But it's all worth it to learn that sometimes you can't just drive through a fence.

John Wick: Chapter 2 - ★★★★☆
This feels like a real success. I think that anyone who sees this movie on purpose is going to like it. Probably, you saw the first one, and you want more, and then you get more. Also, although not based on a game or anything else, this is a really good video game movie.

The only real downside is that any amount of time spent further explaining a mysterious and seemingly complete fictional universe can't help but erode the mystique.

Escape Room Reviews: Midnight on the Bayou

Special note: we were beta testers for this room, which was not yet open to the public at the time that we played. 
Company: Red Lantern Escape Rooms
Room: Midnight on the Bayou
Date Played: 4/11/17
Player Count: 4 (me and a family of 3)
Success:  Success!

Premise: "You haven’t set foot in Bayou High since graduation, but this carnival-themed reunion sounded fun. Though it is a little strange they’re holding the event on the old Boudreau property at the edge of the swamp, where decades ago several students died in a barn fire. And it is odd that all the carnival workers are mysteriously absent, with the exception of your reunion host who keeps nervously glancing at that creepy old chest…” -from their site

Immersion: This room is a) huge, just physically big, and b) totally plausible as the site of a high school reunion. Like, the decorations look a little home-made, but it's just right. The in-character host who stayed in the room with us did an excellent job (I understand there are multiple hosts, each playing their own different but reasonable character). There are also in-character pre-recorded prompts of a different nature, that seemed to play randomly when I was there.  Like hearing the miscellaneous things characters in video games have to say, it's fun to catch them all, but every now and then one is ill-timed or a repeat which takes a tiny bit of the luster off. 

Highlights: There are some very fun interactions in this game.  This room is very non-linear, and there are a series of completely separate threads to follow.  It is sometimes my strategy that when I notice the whole group is focussing on just one object or puzzle, I look for something else to do, and there was always more. I think a big group could split up and follow a few different puzzle threads without ever knowing what their other teammates were up to. (Although, I would prefer to see it all!) Even though I was there in the beta test phase, just about everything was in working order and ready for their big open. I don't usually pay much attention to our finish time, but we wrapped this one up at 59:59.

Lowlights: This was the first game I went to alone / without any of my usual teammates. It worked out that way because the testing was in the middle of a weekday on a day I just happened to be off, and I'm very happy I got to play it, but I think my enjoyment (and my final score) would have gone way up with my regular group. One or two of the story points didn't make the most sense to me, and one or two of the puzzle elements seemed a bit out of place, but nothing especially offputting or game-breaking, and some of those elements may have changed since the game officially opened.

And Finally:   This is a family owned and operated establishment, and it's really a whole family affair. I got to chat with them after the game and their origin story is neat. Certainly, I liked some parts of this game better than others, but it's very possible that the sections I liked better are mostly just the puzzles that I worked on. There's already a plan in place for how this room can be refreshed in the future, and I'm very much looking forward to returning if they go through with it, or open up a new room.  Out of 22 rooms played, I'm going to call this my #5 favorite.

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

#2,341: Operation Avalanche

Hide and Seek - ★★★☆☆
Four young adults disengage from society to go live a big, crazy, all-consuming art project. They make themselves outsiders, but nothing gold can stay.

The Lego Batman Movie - ★★★☆☆
I don't know if it's on the page, or in the hands of the animators, but there are a delightful sack of deep cuts in this thing. DVD buying freeze-framers, if they still exist, are going to have a lot to look for. Maybe that's the secret to selling DVDs.

Somehow this movie still wasn't immune to the DC light-and-noise ending - I think I might have started to doze a little during that part.

Operation Avalanche - ★★★☆☆
Operation Lune - ★★½☆☆
A very moon-y double feature.

I tell a joke in my stand-up, "I think there must have been one week each year at Space Camp when every kid there was a Double Dare champion."

And sometimes I make the mistake of telling that to college kids. It's the kind of sentence that will make a drunken 19-year-old just stare at you. 

But the real mistake is that I don't just move on, I get the idea that I should unpack it for them. 

"Okay," I start in, "Space Camp is this thing that doesn't exist anymore, but it was a place where you could send fancy children so that they could pretend to be a part of the Space Program, which is this thing that doesn't exist anymore, but it was this thing we cooked up in the 60s and it was a plan to shoot United States citizens at the moon. And it worked!  Of course, some people don't believe it, they think the whole thing was faked by Stanley Kubrick, who was a filmmaker that doesn't exist anymore–"

Eventually I realize that I have not so much lost them as never regained them in the first place, because I had unpacked the wrong part of the sentence. 

"Okay," I try again, "Double Dare was a game show, that doesn't exist anymore, where the grand prize, so named for its size compared to the other, lesser prizes, was a trip to Space Camp. Now obviously, we're talking about original Double Dare, and not Double Dare 2000, not Family Double Dare, and definitely not Super Sloppy Double Dare, because as we all know, the grand prize of these latter-day Doubles Dare was a trip to Universal Studios Florida. 

"Also known as the place where Double Dare was taped."

That's right, if you someone found yourself on the show, played your ten-year-old heart out, and won?

You got to go outside.

To the theme park you already paid to enter, so that you could be on Double Dare.

At least runners-up got a home copy of the game, which, if they took it home and played and won, they could put away! And take an all-expenses-paid trip to their kitchen!

#2,338: Weiner

13th - ★★★☆☆
It's so refreshing, personally, to see a thought-through documentary, making deliberate choices in both style and substance. That said, it feels just a little bit like the movie the filmmakers intended to make, and then an extra chunk they didn't plan for, but felt obligated to include.

The Founder - ★★☆☆☆
Man, I was looking forward to this one for a while last year, but I think they forgot at least an act. I guess sometimes there's a reason you move a film to the movie release graveyard.

Snowden - ★★★☆☆
I thought that since I saw Citizenfour, I wasn't going to learn anything from this movie, but I did. I learned a lot about Ed Snowden. IF any of it's true!

Weiner - ★★★½☆
Man. This guy. Is it fair for us to be mad at someone about their addiction? Is there a followup special we can watch where someone confronts him about whether we can pin 45's presidency on him?

In any other political generation to date, I bet he would have just been a well-liked and effective public servant.