A fun night at the museum
GO DEEP INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS (well, a mysterious exhibit in an old museum) to find a powerful and ancient book of magic to reverse a spell and save the day! Solve your way into the mysterious curator’s office and get outta there before it’s too late. Oh, and it’s also haunted.
It’s not often that a live avatar style online game gets released for free, so as soon as it did, we were straight on it! Truth Seekers is a collaboration between The Escape Game and Amazon Prime to promote their new series called, you’ve guessed it, ‘Truth Seekers’. We’re familiar with The Escape Game and we know that nothing they do is half-arsed, so we were in no doubt that this would be the same.
There’s a good chance that all slots for this game are now gone, it was free and on a limited run, so it’s not surprising really. We booked our slot and assembled our team, we opted to play as a team of four as that always feels like a good number as everyone gets a chance to input and it doesn’t feel chaotic.
We joined the Zoom call at our allotted time and were greeted by our host, JT, over in sunny San Francisco. JT wasn’t our ‘man on the ground’ he was simply the host and was in charge of updating the inventory as we progressed through the room. Our ‘man on the ground’ was simply known as the ‘Technician’.
After a nice chat with JT, and a video to explain the story, we were ready to rock! JT handed us over to the Technician and we began our mission to find the book and get out alive!
Worth noting: This game is a rehash of The Escape Game’s ‘Heist’ room, so if you’ve played that game, you may notice a few similarities in this game.
CONCEPT/EXECUTION
As we’ve come to expect from The Escape Game, everything about this experience was slick, tech worked when it was supposed to, the camera work was decent, and we encountered no issues at all with the room itself.
Considering the normal Heist game is a 60 minute experience, I felt they did a good job in condensing this game to 45 minutes and the puzzles were satisfying.
The only thing I think that was perhaps a bit lost on us was the ‘haunted’ aspect. I may have missed it but the closest we got to any ethereal occurrences were other ‘team members’ on the walkie-talkie (or I think that is what it was?).
The Escape Game have a wonderful inventory system that enables us to get both a 360 degree view of the room(s) and can get a closer look at any useful item we may find. JT was on the ball with the inventory, adding items as we found them and then removing then once they were no longer needed.
PUZZLES
As you would expect there was a mixture of puzzles here, decoding, observation, some deductive reasoning, and a minor search element. We found the puzzles to be on the easier side, but this game is not designed to be hard, it’s designed to be fun, and it was.
There was a good use of tech in the room but also a few padlocks/keypads just for good measure. For the longest time ever I’ve been waiting for a room to have a certain cliche mechanism in it, and I finally got it in this game! Was it cliched? Yes. Did I love it? Yes! It was done well and I just wish I could have experienced it first hand in the real room rather than online.
GM/CLUE SYSTEM
JT was a great host and as I said, he kept the inventory up-to-date perfectly. Our ‘Technician’ was keen but I don’t know if she was perhaps new to the role as it was the only part of the experience that felt a little off. When we play, we like to joke around with the avatar a little, but unfortunately it fell flat and we got little in return.
The Technician was also just a little slow with padlocks and understanding our simple commands of ‘look left’ and ‘turn right’, which was a shame as it really slowed down and added frustrations to what could have been a seamless experience. Perhaps something was lost in translation or she didn’t have the right gear to be able to turn padlocks while dealing with the camera? I’m not sure, but this was a free experience so it’s just one of those things.
We didn’t need any clues but if we did, JT was on hand to no doubt give us a bit of a nudge back in the right direction. Clues weren’t limited so if we needed 500 clues, we’d have got 500 clues.
FINAL THOUGHTS
For a free game, this was good fun. The room was up to the usual ‘The Escape Game’ standards and the puzzles were really rather satisfying. Our avatar slowed the pace which ruined our flow a little, but if you get a chance to get a slot for this game, do it.
GOOD TO KNOW
- Number of connections: Up to 8 players
- Price: Free
- Devices: Computer or Tablet recommended
- Platform: Zoom
- Inventory: Yes
- 360º View: Yes
- Time Zone: Pacific Standard Time
Final Rating:
| Puzzles | |
| Concept/Execution | |
| GM/Clue System | |
| Value for Money | |
| Enjoyment |
Team: 4 players
Time Taken: 29:32 mins
Website: https://truthseekersexperience.com
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