Escape Room Junkie: Corpse Inc. (Baarn)

Don’t forget your role!

CORPSE INC takes place in a mortuary in Baarn, but be aware, nothing is what it seems.

You’ll be hired by an anonymous source for an extraordinary mission. In this mortuary are the mortal remains of a person. You and your team are going to try and break into the place to get the remains of this person out of this facility. But there’s a catch, a security guard is constantly guarding the place.

Step into the shoes of a cleaner, employee or as an air conditioning technician,  find out if you and your team are capable of staying out of sight from the guard so you and your team can successfully complete the mission.

CORPSE INC is a nerve-racking escape experience, at which we created a mixture of real life gaming with an actor and the classic escape room with puzzles.

Gord and I had been deliberating a trip to The Netherlands since The Dome took the top spot in the 2019 TERPECAs, but once we properly sat down to plan, we swiftly realised that the exceptional Dutch games are somewhat spread out. When we plan these trips, we base a great many of our decisions on the TERPECA rankings, and while at the time Corpse Inc. was in the 82nd spot in that ranking, that made it the #8 game in The Netherlands according to enthusiasts.  And despite its drop to 150 in the TERPECA’s this year, Corpse Inc. continues to hold the #12 spot for The Netherlands on escapetalk.nl, the area’s alternative to Morty or Escape the Review.  This actually means it ranks above The Dome in the eyes of the locals. That’s a lot of words to say that this was one game I was particularly looking forward to playing.

Although the Dutch trains are infinitely more reliable than their British counterparts, visiting all the games that we wanted to, from our base in Amsterdam using only public transport, while possible, would have been tricky. Which is how we found ourselves out at the airport on our second day in The Netherlands, renting a car to facilitate our mini escape room roadtrip. To be fair, Gord did all the driving, but once we were out of the airport, navigating the roads was simple, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves on the outskirts of Baarn, staring at a rather nondescript building that for all intents and purposes, did, in fact, look like a mortuary. (Or, I guess. I’ve never actually been to one.)

Before we even arrived in The Netherlands, Escape Room Junkie started with their world building, sending us cleverly worded emails about our mission, including the code phrase we would need to enter the building. At the allotted time, we approached the buzzer, gave the code, and finally met our contact. As we were briefed on our mission, it became clear that this wouldn’t be just any ordinary escape room, particularly since the first challenge would be bluffing our way past a guard to even get into the morgue. To do this, we would need to be playing specific roles. With a dossier of information to do just that, we made our way back outside, and around to the locker room to prepare to steal a body.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

From the moment we stepped outside of our car, we were fully immersed in the world of Corpse Inc. And that immersion didn’t break once, not until we emerged, victorious, from our heart pounding final escape.  Knowing that this was a game that involved a live actor, coupled with the fact that the game is set in a morgue, I fully expected Corpse Inc. to be a classic horror experience. Imagine my delight when I discovered that it was, in fact, not. There were certainly moments of unease, and even some moments of adrenaline fuelled action, but this is not an experience designed to terrify players, despite the setting.

Instead, the purpose of the guard is to make the experience just that much more immersive. There is a very real fear of getting caught, and the whole game is highly interactive. The game plays out in a very logical and linear manner, with very little room for deviation, but this is in part due to the fact that there are things that must be done in a very specific order, and this all fits perfectly within the context of the game. The game flows seamlessly from task to task, all the while building in intensity, until the climax, when suddenly it is a frantic race to the finish.

PUZZLES

I loved the puzzles in Corpse Inc. Each and every task from finding our disguises to gain admittance to the mortuary, to actually making our final escape felt so thoroughly entwined with the narrative that there was never any question about why one might need to do this. And even if you did question it, once you had completed the task, or solved the puzzle, the reason behind that particular task became apparent.

There were puzzles that followed an expected sort of escape room style (logic, observational based tasks, pattern recognition), but the truly delightful puzzles that felt more “real” and tactile – changing something in the environment and seeing a real time cause and effect, interacting with or avoiding the guard, and the very physical aspects of the game that made this experience truly immersive.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Everyone we interacted with during our time at Corpse Inc. were 100% employees of the mortuary, not GMs or employees of Escape Room Junkie. Without the interaction with the guard, Corpse Inc. would be a fairly standard, though well executed, escape room. But the character interaction with the staff is what makes Corpse Inc. special. Half the time I’m not sure if our guard knew what to make of our team since we’re a bit wacky, which did make it a little more difficult at times. (Especially when members of the team got caught up in the moment and forgot their assigned roles.)

The clues were worked into the narrative as well. Although any hints or nudges we received were received via Whatsapp, it fit fully within the context of the game (after all, we were hired by the mysterious “Alpha” to steal a corpse – it’s only logical that they would provide a way to contact them should we prove to be slightly incompetent dead body thieves.) Generally, any help sent through from “Alpha” was usually due to the fact that we got excited and missed a critical piece of information that would have helped us, and instead we just tried to bluff our way past the guard again.

ANYTHING ELSE

Corpse Inc. is possibly one of the most interactive games that we have played that isn’t a straight up horror experience. Full of both humour and adrenaline, as well as satisfying puzzles and a twisty narrative, it’s a game that’s worth paying a visit to amongst all the other world-class games in the area.

Also worth pointing out that there is some climbing and crawling involved, so you’ll need a certain level of agility there.

Success / Failure

Final Rating:

Team: 4 players (escaped in 63mins)

Address: Oud Eemnesserweg 5D, 3741 MP Baarn, Netherlands

Website: https://escaperoomjunkie.nl/