Not your average escape room
Playing the best of the 70s, 80s, and beyond, Radio Nowhere is the station everyone’s listening to. But when a body turns up in the recording booth, things get deathly silent.
Identify suspects, narrow down your lines of investigation, and decipher secret broadcasts. Sounds like a normal enough case, but there’s a catch…
The show must go on.
Play your tunes, chat to your audience, and catch this killer before it’s too late.
We’d been hearing a lot about Case Closed in Edinburgh (well, Leith) so much so that when we planned our trip to Edinburgh and Glasgow we specifically timed it so that we could play both their first game, The Murder of Max Sinclair, and their newer game Radio Nowhere. It doesn’t sound like much of a challenge but as the games take place in the same physical space, only one is open at a time so it takes a little extra planning to catch both of them in one trip.
Case Closed have a cracking venue and big plans for the future. The best thing is, if you’re early you can just check out the boardgame café they have and have a lovely cup of coffee while you wait (that’s what we did). We only met two members of the team but they were both lovely and extremely welcoming to us.
After our coffee and peruse of their board games, it was time to get down to business. Our host for Radio Nowhere was the same as our host for Max Sinclair, Ronan. Ronan is one of the owners of Case Closed and as I previously mentioned, has HUGE plans for what they want to offer here.
Ronan gave us the health and safety briefing in the cafe area and also gave us some information so we could familiarise ourselves with the case. I must admit, there was a lot to take in from this introduction. Fortunately Liz is good at listening to these things, so she could remind me later in the game what we were supposed to be doing when I inevitably forgot!
IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN
The thing about this game is that it’s not really about the room design, or the puzzles, it’s more like an interactive ‘whodunnit’ with very strong GM interaction. You could possibly class it as live actor, but even that doesn’t seem to fit. The games at Case Closed are just different and kinda hard to quantify how they should be classed.
Anyway, like I said, this game takes place in exactly the same space as Max Sinclair, so if you’ve played one then you won’t get too many surprises from the other. They do a good job of turning it into a different space, even if it is just putting black cloths over things. Really both games have different focal points and these are what take your attention so you don’t really need to worry about the little details.
I’d say there were two stand out elements from the games at Case Closed: the GM interaction, and the use of lighting. At times it felt very film noir, with different things lighting up as the narrator talked about them and then slowly disappearing again. This strong use of lighting was used throughout and it was a clever way to guide attention to certain areas only when needed.
PUZZLES
As I mentioned, this is more like a big ‘whodunnit’ and if you’re looking for a game full of puzzles then you’ll be sorely disappointed here. This game has a lot of reading, piecing bits of information together, and then committing to your choice. Personally, it’s not really my type of game as I prefer good old fashioned puzzles to solve and story often gets lost on me. This was a game where Liz was in her element. With her stupidly good attention to detail and story, she very much carried us through this game and I was just along for the ride – and at times I was at a loss for what to do.
It’s not really a puzzle, but part of the game is to be the best DJ you can be, and this is one of those things where the more you put into it, the more you get out. I think I probably spent more of my time being a DJ than I did solving the mystery – read into that what you will.
GM/CLUE SYSTEM
The clue system in this game is another stand out for Case Closed. No two clues came in the same way, and some of the clues were disguised in such a clever way that you may not even realise you are receiving help. Very clever and very much on theme.
I’m not sure of Ronan’s background, but I’d hazard a guess that ‘actor’ is probably in that history somewhere. He played his part perfectly and never left us lingering too long if we needed assistance. And, then when it was really his time to shine, he came through once again.
ANYTHING ELSE
I think our problem was that we play Radio Nowhere too close to having played Max Sinclair, so the wow moment just didn’t land in the same way it had done the first time round. The ending(s) were fun and your team size will depend on if everyone has that fun, and it was certainly something different.
Radio Nowhere can’t really be classed as an ‘escape room’, or not in my eyes anyway. It has a couple of puzzles but it’s perhaps closer to what I hear Jubensha is – kinda like a live-action whodunnit where the whole purpose is to piece together the information you need. Some people will love it, some probably not so much.
My advice, perhaps leave it a while between playing their games so the fun bits feel more special.
Success / Failure
Final Rating:
| Operation | |
| Puzzles | |
| Room Design | |
| GM/Clues | |
| Excitement |
Team: 2 players – around 90 mins
Address: 1 Carpet Ln, Leith, Edinburgh EH6 6SS
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