Escape Rooms – Project D.I.V.A

From http://www.escaperooms.co.uk/angel.html

The Year is 2038 and our civilisation is slowly conquering the solar system. The use of Artificial Intelligence is essential in paving our path to other planets and has even enabled us to begin terraforming Mars.

However a few nights ago ER-27, one of our defence and research stations that is orbiting Mars, went totally silent. D.I.V.A (Defence Interactive Virtual Assistant) the stations A.I. sent us a cryptic message with depictions of death and soon after the station started falling into lower orbit. If it keeps descending at this rate it will impact the surface, destroying all our our research and the station itself, both of which are vital to our future colonisation efforts, we cannot afford to lose them.

As our finest agents, we are sending you on a mission to intercept ER-27, get on board and destroy D.I.V.A and regain control of the station. You will need to infiltrate her core and remove her 4 hard drives to disable her then use them to reboot the system. The future of humanity depends on you.

Are you Ready?

Team- Ster, Ni, Simon, Stu

Played – 14/8/17

(Reviewed by Ster)

Escape Rooms

This was our first visit to Escape Room’s Angel location and it was fairly easy to find. There was plenty of waiting space for two separate teams, though we were the only team there when we arrived.

The Room

The room was brilliantly themed and pretty big, which was fun as we started to explore and move through the space. There is a lot of information for this game given over an electronic device which is used to scan QR codes to access more information. While I really like the idea of this and it seems a great way to both find and store details throughout the game, the devices were slow which led to a lot of frustration and we seemed to get one piece of information far ahead of time which slowed us down as we tried to use something that hadn’t actually come into play yet.

The first puzzles in this room were good fun, the room was pretty dark and there was a lot of peering into the gloom trying to search for the puzzles we needed to complete next, which set up the rogue AI taking control of the ship theme quite nicely.

The middle section of the game was very different. 2 members of the team have to enter a different section of the room and solve puzzles by themselves there, which left 2 people just standing around waiting for them. Following that, there was a large puzzle that only really needed one person to complete. While I really enjoyed the uniqueness of the puzzles I felt like there could have been a few extra little things going on the keep the rest of the team occupied, especially as those involved in solving these aspects of the game seemed to really enjoy them.

The final section of the room was a little underwhelming to be honest, but there was some really nice theming at the end which did a great job of wrapping up the story.

Ni – Having done the London Bridge rooms, I was quite surprised that this room had very few puzzles to solve, and at quite a few points most of the team were watching just one person complete a physical puzzle. There were some good puzzles at the start, but I felt they faded away to an impressive set without much to do. That being said, it was definitely memorable!

Simon – I’m a bit of a sci-fi geek, so a game on a space station was something I was definitely looking forward to. The game is constructed really well and uses the space of the room in a clever way. The darkness of the room was slightly frustrating, but it did fit the theme well. The gameplay was interesting and the part where we were split up did feel interesting. While I did enjoy the game and the gameplay, the downsides of this room were the iPod Touch that we were given, which wasn’t as responsive as it could have been and did slow us down; and the music in the background, which was quite loud and made it more difficult to communicate as a team! Not a bad game though, with great use of scenery and technology.

Score

This room was definitely different and had some very interesting elements to it, but it didn’t quite live up to the quality of Escape Room’s other games at the London Bridge location. There was some frustrating elements and the handheld devices seemed to slow the experience down rather than enhance it. That being said, this is the perfect room for players who enjoy a more physical type of puzzle.

Difficulty

3/5

Overall

2.5/5