Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Escape Room Games

The birthday girl arranged for us to play an 'Escape Room' game. Not sharing where and what. There're plenty of these Rooms around nowadays with exciting themes. None of us are interested in the props. That's what the Xbox, PS4 and video games are for. It's the riddle-solving and code-cracking we're interested in. I don't do horror houses well because you know...claustrophobia and mild paranoia mean that I'll forget that this is a game. In this case, my instincts always override logic and I tend to whack anything that jumps out at me. The birthday girl scouted around and picked the 'hardest' game this one store offered, without being blindfolded and the assurance that nothing will leap at us.

It was hilarious how all of us combed through the indemnity form, religiously read every line, and signed with disclaimers. Can't help it. Occupational hazard. We zealously read fine print and convoluted sentences. Refused to waive our rights to have photos taken and randomly uploaded in all marketing materials, objected to provide NRIC numbers. We HATE this sort of requests, and especially DISAPPROVE OF local companies for refusing to respect that. Obviously nobody bothered reading our signed indemnity form. At the end, when the staff asked to take a group shot of us, we declined. CRAZY. Why would we permit a photo of us on YOUR PHONE? And you didn't offer to tell us where these photos would go until we asked. On YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE. No friggin way. It's like an endorsement for your Game or whatever, and a location tag to where we were at a given time. CRAZY. Some privacy please. HELLO SINGAPORE AND YOUR NON-EXISTENT PRIVACY LAWS.

Anyway. No one has been to this particular Room. It was pretty challenging. Out of the allotted 60 minutes, we spent a good 30 minutes bumping around, doing nothing productive, save for knowing that we must get the codes to open the locked drawers and cabinets. We obediently placed all cellphones into the locker. All we needed was pen and paper. The staff reminded us not to physically smash anything in the Room. At the end, the staff came in all flummoxed. He said we were the first team to have skipped every other step, yet broke the codes to all the locks in a non-sequential manner, found a laptop, solved the password to enter it (which wasn't that tough), and even cracked the magic combination to the dial-lock safe without the aid of clues (don't ask how we did this), and successfully retrieved the final document and the key-card to tap out of the locked room, effectively cleared the game with three minutes to spare. LOL.

Zipped to Brewerkz for a 'post-mortem'. AAR! An after-action-review. Heh. We're nerdy like that. Dissected the process. You see, we should have cracked the puzzles in 40 minutes instead of taking up the full hour because we weren't all thinking straight or in full work mode on a weekend. :P Puzzle-solving. Isn't this what we do best, and especially so as a team? This team rocks. Oof.

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