Lake Escapes: Modern Detective (Play at Home)

Case closed!

A woman by the name of Sarah Markham has been murdered in her apartment. The 31 year old was found dead in her home in the early hours of this morning. The police have arrested 6 suspects for this murder but as of right now we are unable to determine which one committed the crime.

You and your fellow detectives have been given the task of solving this murder with the incentive of a promotion if you are successful. The suspects have been detained for some time now and without any firm leads they will have to be released before the hour is up.

You must search the crime scene and use the evidence you find to decipher the clues the killer left and solve the case.

The halt in the investigation has the public worried that the killer will strike again. Fear is sweeping across London and everyone is asking the same question: Who killed Sarah?

Can you solve the case?

We’ve not actually made it up to the Lake District yet to play any of the real-life games by Lake Escapes, so when we saw they were digitising a number of them we thought it was too good of an opportunity to pass up and Modern Detective was the game that we chose.

We received the email from Lake Escapes just after paying and that contained all the information we needed for our game. It’s worth noting that the game link expires 72 hours after you start the game, so make sure you can set aside the time and only click start when you’re actually ready to play it through.

As we play most of our ‘In Real Life’ (IRL) games as a team of two, we decided to play this one in the same way. So we got our trusty escape room notebook, and sat side-by-side on the couch with our laptops and then logged in to try and solve the case!

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

This is a Telescaped (is that a word?) version of their IRL game, that means they’ve basically gone into the room with a 360 camera and then taken photos of everything. So other than the smell of the room, you get pretty much the same experience that you would if you were physically in the room.

Before you start the game you are directed to load up the Detective’s Handbook which contains some useful information for the game, some of it is just general background stuff which I imagine would help with inexperienced players, while the rest of it is there to specifically help you in your mission of identifying the killer.

The Telescape interface worked well for the most part and we found it easy to navigate around the game and see what we needed. We did have a couple of small issues but that was likely mostly down to us. At one point we did something in the game that unlocked two things but we didn’t realise so spent another ten minutes trying to work out what to do before we happened to randomly click on what we needed.

Our biggest gripe with real games that have been converted to Telescape is when there are photos of things in the room that you can get a close up of them, but they aren’t actually needed. For us, this feels like an unwanted distraction, but I can see why they do it so this really is a personal preference and I would imagine it doesn’t bother other players like it bothers us.

PUZZLES

Surprisingly for an online game, Modern Detective had quite a heavy search element to it and at times this frustrated us, especially with the previously mentioned issue of not noticing something had unlocked so we couldn’t find the final piece we needed. Ignoring that, the signposting in the game was generally good and some of the puzzles were really quite clever.

Other than the search element, there were puzzles that involved observation and pattern recognition, and then the usual sort of escape room-esque puzzle types that you’ll have likely come across before. I was going to say logic puzzles but off the top of my head I can’t recall if there were any or not, I normally remember these as I usually instantly pass them over to Liz – so I’ll just assume there weren’t any.

In a way just working out what you needed to enter in the Telescape text box was a puzzle in itself. Perhaps we were just having an off-day but we found it a bit tricky at times to work out what combination of words needed to be entered in order for us to continue, and sometimes we felt like we were just taking a shot in the dark with our combination guesses.

CLUE SYSTEM

The clue system was accessible at all times from the evidence bin in the room. We had to use it a couple of times and found it a bit hit or miss. It worked well for the puzzles that weren’t search related, although it seemed to lag behind our progress a little. But where it fell down was on the search element. We had unlocked everything we needed to unlock but of course we didn’t realise this, so when we consulted the clue system all it could tell us was that we should have all the bits we need. This caused immense frustration and if it could have offered a bit more detail such as ‘did you find the X in the black Y? What about the X in the big Z?’. Like I say though, we could have just been having an off day and I’d imagine the clue system is probably enough to get most players back on track.

FINAL THOUGHTS

At times we were frustrated with this game, but overall it was a decent game. I have no doubt that it would be better in real life, but for a digitised room it should still keep you entertained for at least an hour.

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Laptop/Desktop computer
• Notepad for note taking

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken: 1hr 27 mins

Website: https://www.lakesescapes.co.uk