Locked In Edinburgh: Space Academy (Edinburgh)

Don’t press the button?

You will be aware of the huge achievements of NASA. The lesser known Scottish project, SASA, has been under development for 2 years. Built at Port Edgar Marina from sheet metal and Scottish girders. SPACE CADETS form an orderly queue, we are ready to blast off on our first training mission. Will you be brave enough to volunteer?

Our second game of our little Scotland trip was Space Academy at Locked in Edinburgh. We’d just played The Secret Lab and had The Cutting Room and Distillery lined up for later in the trip. The Secret Lab was a huge puzzle fest and we barely got out by the skin of our teeth, so we were hoping that Space Academy would perhaps be a little simpler.

Locked In Edinburgh is in a really interesting building that used to be a veterinary college and now feels like it’s a bohemian commune with art, a pub, and a lovely little coffee shop all on site. It’s worth noting that Locked In Edinburgh doesn’t really have a waiting area of their own so if you’re early, your best bet is to take a seat in the common area outside.

We had a little time between our games so we popped down to the coffee shop and sat at a picnic table while we waited for Space Academy to be ready and for the GM to come and collect us. We didn’t catch the name of our GM for this game, but just before our allotted time she found us and escorted us back up the stairs and to the very colourful corridor so we could receive our mission briefing.

Mission understood, it was time to head to space (and it’s not the first time in my life that I’ve been called a Space Cadet)!

This game is listed as a minimum of three players on the Locked In Edinburgh website, but we asked and they let us play as a two. One puzzle did need a workaround from the GM but this didn’t detract from the game at all.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

First things first, this is a split start game, so if you’re playing as a team of two you really need to have faith in your partner and their escape room skills! You will eventually be reunited (assuming you solve the puzzles) and the connection between the rooms will involve some climbing, but if you don’t want to or are not up to it, you can just go back through the doors you entered through – a nice work around to make the game more inclusive.

I’ve not been on too many spaceships but SASA have done a pretty good job of creating their ship. I would imagine that spaceships would have lots of physical things to interact with and plenty of shiny looking things – yep and yep.

Possibly my favourite thing about this game was that it wasn’t dark. At least it wasn’t dark enough where it was a struggle to see what we needed to see. I hate when a game is dark just to be annoying and no torches are provided, but SASA know how to make a spaceship, and lighting was on their checklist!

There were a few surprises and some theatrics thrown into Space Academy, some to help you feel immersed in the story and others to perhaps just add a little humour to the experience. I believe there were possibly even a few nods in the game to various sci-fi tv shows/movies.

PUZZLES

If you’re looking for a game that is low on padlocks and high on tech, then Space Academy is a good shout as there is a lot of tech in this game – and it seemed to all work, bonus!

With this game being a split start, the first task you have is to establish communication between the rooms, but fortunately that’s not too hard. So it’s no surprise that at least early on the key type of puzzle is communication. As the game develops, so do the puzzle types; searching, observation, audio, basic maths, decoding, teamwork and some tactile puzzles too.

As I mentioned at the start this game does have a minimum number of players of three. But if you speak nicely to Locked In Edinburgh they should be able to hook you up if you want to play as a two (don’t even think about playing solo, that just won’t work). The workaround that the GM put in place so that we could still complete everything was seamless and didn’t take away anything from our experience.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

The clue system for Space Academy was an extremely helpful (for the most part) AI called ‘D1CK’ – I think that stood for something but I can’t remember now what it was. D1CK would chime in as and when we needed any assistance, and also was there when we needed the third pair of hands that we didn’t have.

I can’t recall if we needed any help, but I do remember that D1CK did chime in on occasion to either add some humour, or give us a nudge in the right direction.

ANYTHING ELSE

Space Academy was a fun experience with plenty of tech and theatrics to boot. I wouldn’t want to play this in a massive team, but four players would probably be a good number. A solid set, fun puzzles, and a lovely host made for an enjoyable experience for us.

Success / Failure

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players – 43:08

Address: 1 Summerhall, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL

Website: https://www.lockedinedinburgh.com