Escape Room Reviews: Dracula

Company: 60Out
Room: Dracula
Date Played: 11/26/17
Player Count: 5. 3-4 would probably be best.
Success:  Success!

Premise: You know how sometimes your village gets a dracula, and you hope it’s just going to go away, but you start running out of eligible young people after a while, and then you’ve got to send a posse to vanquish the demon? That.

Immersion: As expected with 60Out, this is a room with lovely production design. It’s the high end of game show-esque design. 

Highlights: This was a cool room to showcase what room escapes can be like for the new players joining us for their first game. There’s an action sequence unlike anything I’ve seen in a room before.

Lowlights:  As usual, wear and tear on magical objects can make them finicky.  Also, our GM chimed in a lot - some GMs get trigger happy with the PA system, especially since a few times he was actually trying to talk to players in a different game.

And Finally:   I think you could probably sequence break this game. We didn’t, because the technically optional parts were easily accessible and listed in order in our dracula journal / walkthrough manual, but since we ignored the clues they produced, we might as well not have bothered with them. This was a fun game, but probably mid-tier as far as 60Out goes. Out of 39 games played, I’m ranking this one at #17. 

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.60out.com/los-angeles/rooms/dracula

Kickstarter Monday: The Arts

Let’s kickstart this month’s blogging with some more kickstarter projects in review!

221B Baker St - I have a little bit more art than I have the wall space to tastefully display it at the moment. (Lucky me!) I like screen prints of images that I believe are subtle in their geekiness. A beautiful wintery landscape, for instance, with just one little clue that it’s actually about Star Wars. This project was for a not-that-subtle Sherlock Holmes piece by an artist who did some other work I already own. It’s lovely, but it’s mostly just sitting in a tube right now. Alas. 

HERTZFELDT ON BLU-RAY - The collected works of Don Hertzfeldt, as seen previously in: a) his touring Animation Show, b) his DVDs, and c) the collections of internet pirates, all on a brand new disc! This was the disc of It’s Such a Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow, the first films in a new, longer, even sadder direction. All of the old films are ‘bonus features.’ I feel good about supporting this guy and his work. It’s lovely, and it mostly sits on the shelf all day. 

Bring Back MST3K - Price is Right rules don’t really work out great on Kickstarter, but I gave this project exactly $1. I didn’t feel like I needed any more MST merch in my apartment, I guess. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted any more MST episodes. Not all of the shows come back to life gracefully, you know? On top of that, I wasn’t totally sure that I wouldn’t end up working on it in some way. I’ve worked with Joel before, and in another weird turn I found that I know the new cast.

In the end, I got a lot of email updates and watched around half of the new season, which probably right about average for me. It wasn’t as weird as I thought it was going to be, or at least, not for the reasons I was expecting. I think the industrialized nature of production on the new season hurt the quality somewhat, but the end product was probably a best-case scenario. It sits around on Netflix all day. 

Escape Room Reviews: The Norcross Art Gallery

Company: Evil Genius Escape Rooms
Room: The Norcross Art Gallery
Date Played: 11/24/17
Player Count: 2
Success:  Hint-free Success!

Premise: Having just fled the scene of Occam’s Apartment, agent X informs you that the art gallery may contain vital clues regarding the Evil Genius. And it does!

Immersion: This room totally looks like it belongs in a museum. Art abounds! Also, while this is not a scary room / experience, this might be the only room I’ve seen so far that has a genuinely creepy aspect to it.

Highlights: So often I want to complain about rooms that are little more than a collection of weird interaction devices someone built, lining the walls for no particular reason. But an art gallery is the perfect excuse to cover the walls with things that need the players’ attention. It’s a brilliant idea. Likewise the self-guided tour is a gimmick that is more fun and makes so much more sense than the increasingly common diaries and journals that are practically room walkthroughs. There’s a turn in the middle that I thought was pretty funny.

Lowlights: I don’t know if I have anything to complain about. I loved the theme, the puzzles all made sense to me (eventually) and we didn’t have to call for help, nothing was worn out or broken. There may have been a puzzle I didn’t understand, but if so that’s just because my partner solved it. 

And Finally:  I had read other reviews online that said this room was a let down after Evil Genius’s fantastic first part. I’m so glad I don’t agree. Everything about this was a delight. Like the Laboratory, I could imagine wanting to replay this (or to do the continuous experience offered here: playing both rooms as one big game) in the future, just for the enjoyment of physically running through it all again. I revisit some games like The Room series about once a year, and I could see doing the same with the cream of the live action adventure game crop. Keeping a numeric list is a crazy thing to do in the first place, but ranking my A+ rooms against each other is even more difficult. For today, out of 38 games played, I’m ranking this one at #3. I think I may have found it more satisfying than Occam's Apartment, but I think you should play that one first. 

How to book this room yourself: Visit http://www.evilgeniusescaperooms.com/our-rooms/

#2,407: Justice League

Roman J. Israel, Esq. - ★★★☆☆
Feels a little like Denzel’s Monster, he's out to win some prizes. I kind of wouldn’t’ve minded seeing the ‘before’ picture, where Roman Israel just does a lot of skillful lawyering.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - ★★★½☆
I think this is a movie that wants to remind us to imagine others complexly, and that's a reminder we could really use right now. Maybe all the time, but also right now.

Sometimes, I think I review the advertising instead of the picture. After all, I've probably logged more time watching the trailer for Three Billboards this year than I did watching the film. I'm really glad there was more substance to the movie than what was on display, and that kind of sums up the whole thing.

Justice League - ★★☆☆☆
I try to be an optimist, but DC doesn’t make it easy.

Diana: I like that she spams her finishing move all over the place. It's like the ‘why not start with the giant robot’ problem. But she seems dumber now–like I know we have to keep referring to ‘a pilot she once knew’ because someone in a meeting gave a note that JL should tie into the other movies more, but from her perspective he died a hundred years ago. They only spent a week together. I think it's fair for her to move on.

Superman: Some of the whedonisms were even more jarring than in Avengers because we’ve already established these characters, and Zach Snyder’s Superman isn’t particularly jokey. There’s room for all kinds of supermen, but please pick one.

Most of the time in a Superman movie, there’s never a sense of just how strong he is. Is it difficult to catch a space shuttle? Or to lift an island into space? It's great that we see him casually flying that building around just before doing something he finds difficult.

Also, raising the dead is surprisingly simple!

Flash: He's the fun thing in the movie, much more appropriate as a Whedon-y character. I liked when they did that super-speed scene from X-Men, and the race scene. The first time, at least. Why would you put it in the movie twice?

Cyborg: in the interest of brevity, he sucks.

GL: I was wrong. I thought this movie was going to pull an Iron Man Three-style double bluff where *obviously* Superman comes back, but that distracts all the nerds from the real reveal - The introduction of one of the space heroes halfway through the movie. Preferably a Green Lantern whose interest is piqued by Darkseid’s bad behavior. We had a GL in a flashback, but that’s not the same. I bet he was in an earlier script though. Otherwise, unite the seven what? It's not seas. This is not a movie about the sea. Aquaman, while present, didn't even have a character.

#2,404: Murder on the Orient Express

LBJ - ★★½☆☆
This is the Greatest Hits of Lyndon Johnson. All the things you know about him. All the popular quotes and stories. You’re welcome, high school history teachers.

The Whole Truth - ★½☆☆☆☆
Forgettable despite the barrage of Shocking Twists.

Murder on the Orient Express - ★★½☆☆
It’s still technically period, but the story has been wrung through a modernizer, maybe one borrowed from Guy Ritchie. We’ve got new scenes to demonstrate Poirot’s badassery, and much fancier exteriors. It does make me want to go watch the Lumet version again.