Hysteria: Citizen Erased (Chatham)

Welcome to Space Jail!

In the year 2120, humanity has expanded into the far reaches of space and built a prison facility orbiting Earth.

The only way to transport inmates to the prison is via a high-security space shuttle that departs once a month. You and your team are falsely accused of a crime and sentenced to life imprisonment on the asteroid prison. But before the shuttle takes off, you discover a malfunction in the shuttle’s systems, leaving you and your team with a small window of time to escape.

Can you work together to navigate the shuttle’s complex systems and find a way to override the launch sequence before it’s too late? You have 60 minutes before the shuttle takes off and you’re trapped in space forever.

It’s no secret that Kent has an oddly high concentration of great escape rooms, and Chatham is home to some of the best, Hysteria and Unsolved Mysteries – run by the same amazing team. We’ve been trying to make our way back to Chatham for a long time, and thanks to a weekend in London the opportunity finally presented itself.  So with no hesitation we booked in the remaining games at both venues that we still needed to play.

First up was Citizen Erased, a game that used to be 75 minutes but in recent times has been trimmed down and made a 60 minute game. When we arrived we were greeted by our wonderful host, Ashley (we’re pretty sure it was Ashley) and had a lovely little chat before getting down to business.

He gave us the health and safety briefing as normal and then disappeared. When he returned, he was in the character of the warden for the prison that we were soon to be incarcerated in. As we were led into the room we were given our prison IDs and then each handcuffed to the wall.

One thing worth pointing out about Citizen Erased is that this is a tech heavy game, and generally tech seems to put out a lot of heat. We played this on a rather warm day and by the time we were finished, we were melting. Fortunately, our very considerate GM gave us a fan to take in which helped somewhat.

We played this game as a team of two and that felt like a good size. I’m not sure what the maximum capacity is for it, but I’d probably not want to play with more than four players. There were also perhaps three steps in the room that would make it a little less accessible to some players.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

I’ve got to say it, jailbreak games are an escape room theme that rarely excite us as we’ve played and seen so many. But Hysteria took that theme and gave it a twist: Space Jail – much better. So other than starting off in handcuffs, this game didn’t feel much like those jailbreak games that we’ve played before.

Thanks to our team’s stupidity we spent much longer in handcuffs than we should have, and somehow I managed to tighten mine further in that time so it got painful quite quickly. I was certainly very grateful when I got those off!

Citizen Erased really wasn’t a huge space but the space that they had was well used (including the entry to the game itself). Each space we encountered fit the narrative well and everything, including the puzzles felt like an integrated part of the theme.

This game starts off dark – very dark. But once you progress you’ll find that the lighting is more than adequate and we never really had any issues with what we needed to see. Ambient noises/music was also being played throughout which helped us to feel a few light-years away from Chatham.

PUZZLES

If you’re looking for a game that makes use of tech and very little use of padlocks, then Citizen Erased could be your game – there is a lot of tech used here! We found the puzzles in this game to be at just the right level to be a challenge without being frustrating or equally too easy, and varied.

Obviously the first puzzle was to work out how to get out of our handcuffs (a task that Liz made infinitely harder) and then we found the puzzles were a decent mixture of; observation, decoding, pattern recognition, searching, audio, and communication.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

I do like it when a room has a clue system that feels like it was part of the game, and in Citizen Erased it was very much that. If we needed help at all we simply had to ask for it and an ‘AI’ system would get us back on track – ok it was just our GM, but at least it was part of the narrative.

From what I recall there were a couple of occasions where we were being a bit dim and needed this assistance, and at one point we just needed a bit of guidance on how to use a specific bit of tech. When that help was required, we never had to wait long which was a sign that our GM was watching us closely.

ANYTHING ELSE

The team behind Hysteria and Unsolved Mysteries are lovely people and they produce solid games. Citizen Erased is another fun game that gave us a welcome distraction from the real world. Play on a hot day and you may get a tad toasty, but whatever the weather, if you play this game you are sure to have a good time.

Success/Failed

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players – escaped in 46:58

Address: 38A High St, Chatham ME4 4EA

Website: https://hysteriaescaperooms.com