Trapped: Flight 927 (Play at Home)

Passports at the ready!

Solve the puzzles to flee the island. Not long into your holiday flight, the plane plunges. Over the tannoy the pilot shouts, “Brace for impact!” Panicked, you adopt the brace position – and then… Darkness! As you regain consciousness, you open your eyes and realise the plane is down! Now it’s up to you to call for rescue. Can you get into the cockpit, send out a distress signal – and save the day?

We played all three of the Trapped Season one games, Carnival, The Bank Job, and The Art Heist, so when we saw Season two was being released, we were eager to give them a go, and with a line up that includes this game, The Zoo and Mission to Mars it was easy to be excited.

We’ve played a lot of online games over the last year, and although we still love playing them, sometimes it’s nice to have a break from the computer. I think that’s where Trapped have created themselves a wonderful little niche, play at home escape rooms that don’t require technology (yes there are others which are similar, but nothing quite like this).

We needed a break from writing reviews, so we stopped for a while to play this game. Pro Tip: if you’re ever thinking of starting a blog, don’t play 59 games in two weeks, it’s really not a good idea! We decided to start Trapped Season Two with this game as it was the hardest of the line up and seemed like a good starting point as we could save the more fun themed ones for later.

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

Although there are many play at home escape room games, Trapped feel unique because they are a self contained box (no computers needed) and you actually set up items around the room to make it feel more immersive.

As always, Liz set up this game while I was pretending to be busy. Even though Liz set it up she was still able to participate, it just meant the search aspect wasn’t too challenging for her. I think that is the best feature of these games, one person sets them up, but they can still take part. These games really would be great for parties, but especially children’s birthday parties.

There are components of the game that may need to be written on while playing, so this takes away the replayability aspect of the game. However, if you’re careful I think you could get away with using it again.

Unlike some of the other Trapped games, this one was actually set up to utilise two rooms! A nice touch that gave a nostalgic feel of real life escape room’s ‘secret room’.

PUZZLES

I don’t know if I just don’t remember much about the Trapped Season One games, but this game felt like it has a lot more content than its predecessors. Liz set it up but I felt like I was finding pieces of it everywhere, and when we brought it all together we had a lot to get through.

This is the hardest game in the series and we made the mistake of assuming that it meant it would be really hard, it wasn’t, we just over complicated a few puzzles to make our lives harder.

The puzzles in the game were fair and made sense. Generally there was some maths (a calculator may help), logic, observation, searching (depends on how sneaky the person setting it up is), and decoding.

Out of all the puzzles, one stood out to me as a favourite. I won’t spoil it, but if you grew up in the early days of the Windows operating systems and played some of the free games on there, then one puzzle may look familiar. Perhaps it was just nostalgia, but I enjoyed it.

I’m putting it under puzzles as it probably fits best here, but when playing at home games with no computer use, sometimes the problem is knowing if you have the right answer. Trapped have built in a little system to help you know if you have the correct solution, it’s probably not 100% foolproof but it works and we made it through. Once you progress you will find that your answers are verified so if you did get something wrong, you can go back and rectify.

CLUE SYSTEM

Trapped have one of my favourite clue systems for a play at home game. Essentially it is just a book and a ‘decoder card’, but it works so well because of its simplicity. Without the card the book just looks like a random assortment of words, but when you use the card you can make out sentences that are designed to get you up and running again.

Each puzzle piece has a unique number on it that tells you where you need to look for help. For most puzzles there are three clues and if you still don’t understand, you can get the solution. We needed to look at this early on to get our bearings, but once we did that it was plain sailing.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Flight 927 felt like a step up on the previous season by Trapped. Puzzles were fair, story made sense, and it kept us occupied for nearly an hour. If you need a break from a computer, then this is the game you’re looking for.

TOOLS REQUIRED

• Note-taking implements may be useful
• Calculator may help

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players

Time Taken:  50 minutes

Website: Available from a number of escape rooms or on Amazon

*Disclaimer: we weren’t charged for this experience and it was gifted by Golden Bear, but this has not influenced our review