Lee Ballan: The Pyramid (Play at Home)

Not one for the faint-hearted

While walking through the desert, you found a mysterious pyramid.

You’ve already seen enough movies about people who investigate mysterious pyramids, and it has never ended well, so you’ve decided to completely ignore all of that knowledge, and investigate the pyramid!

The pyramid has three entrances  – red, green and blue. You chose to split between the entrances, and investigate the secrets and mystery of the structure!

In order to reach the top of the pyramid, you need to solve 10 puzzles. But – you are split into three teams.

In order to succeed, the three teams need to work together. It’s important for you to communicate, in order to solve all of the puzzles.

We had heard that this game was going to be tricky so we assembled a team of bloggers to tackle it; we were joined by the brains behind Brit of an Escape Habit and Armchair Escapist. We’ve done a fair number of online escape rooms now and hands-down this was the hardest one we have come across so far (or it was late and we weren’t on form).

Unlike most games that we’ve seen, this game isn’t by a company with a cliched name like ‘Generic Escape Room Company’ but strangely seems to have been created by a one man show, an escape room puzzle designer named Lee Ballan from Israel. We’re getting a world tour with all these escape games!

The end goal of The Pyramid is pretty simple, you need to reach the top of the pyramid by completing 10 puzzles. That’s where ‘simple’ ends though, as we soon found out.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

It’s worth noting that for this game you need to have at least three players, with each person taking a team. Obviously you can have more players on each team if you want. We had three teams with two players on each and this seemed to work well.

The three teams, blue, green, and red all worked on puzzles at the same time yet we all had different pieces of the puzzle so had to work together to share what we had so we could progress.

This game has a 12 hour time limit but there is also an additional points system in play, where a maximum score of 600 is possible. We weren’t really fussed about our score but if you were competing against friends then it gives a tangible way to see who won (on a metric other than time).

In the intro for this game they recommend/advise using a collaborative online drawing tool called Aggie.io; effectively its MS Paint but you can all see and draw on it at the same time – it worked really well.

The actual set up of the game itself seemed pretty basic and our interactions were mostly with images and text. When the game started we knew how many puzzles we would encounter so that took away any surprise there, but it was quite nice to know how far on our journey we were.

PUZZLES

This game is all about the puzzles, and after playing the game I feel like I have a love/hate relationship with them. While solving some of the puzzles I think I hated them, yet when completed, I loved them. It’s really odd and I still don’t know how I feel about them.

We were lulled into a false sense of security with this game as it started off very easily, but that didn’t last long and we found the puzzles got harder and harder the further we progressed up the pyramid.

The puzzles were a mixture of pretty much everything, but the underlying theme with all of them is communication. Every single puzzle relied on all the teams communicating with each other, but the way in which you communicate and what you need to communicate changes each time.

We struggled on two puzzles, mostly due to over complication on our part. Once we solved the puzzles (occasionally after using hints) we realised the error of our ways and got over our frustrations.

If I had to choose my favourite puzzles then puzzle  seven and puzzle 10 are probably those. I can’t go into detail why, but if you play the game I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Puzzle nine also is firmly rooted in my memory, I don’t know if I liked it or not but as we spent the longest on that one, I don’t think I’ll forget it any time soon. Actually, now that I never have to solve it again, I think I actually liked it.

TLDR; the puzzles are bloody hard!

CLUE SYSTEM

The clue system was a little bit confusing to be honest (but it was late in the night). Each team could access clues, and when you clicked on clues you could choose which one you wanted and how many points you were willing to sacrifice in order to pass the puzzle. I think it was just confusing as we weren’t used to being able to request how much help we wanted, normally it’s a take it or leave it type of deal.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This will go down as one of the hardest online games we’ve played to date. If you want a game that is heavy on communication and is a real challenge then this is the game for you.

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Laptop/Desktop computer
• Aggie.io (useful)
• Zoom (or something similar)
• Search engine (unless you have really good general knowledge)
• Speakers turned on
• Notepad for note taking

Final Rating:

Team: 6 players

Time Taken: 1h 44 mins

Website: https://travelandquest.com/en/player-explore-quest?questId=uBJFtn9hpzPu8EdDc9FT

*Disclaimer: we weren’t charged for this experience, but this has not influenced our review.