The Escape Game – Ruins: Forbidden Treasure (Review)

Location: Your Home via the Magic of the Internet!

Players:  We recommend 2-4

Price: $25 per person

Time to Escape: 60 minutes

Theme:

From the The Escape Game website:

You’re on a relaxing aerial tour of a remote jungle when everything suddenly falls apart. You’re stranded at the foot of ancient and mysterious temple ruins – home of a massive fabled treasure. Adventure has come knocking and the treasure could be yours for the taking! Fortune favors the bold. Will it favor you?

First Impressions:

At the start of our game, we met one of our favorite people we’ve ever met within an escape game, Captain Mac, who would be flying us to the site of our adventure. A man of pure joy and light, we were highly entertained by his beautifully produced and informative educational video, right up until the plane crashed. But, you know, five stars up until that minor incident!

Captain Mac’s tours are brilliant!

High Points:

Our Game Master Brianna and Avatar “Jungle Scout” were great, helping us explore this beautiful room remotely. Set design is amazing, and made us wish we were physically in the room, but I didn’t feel that much was lost in translation, or that we were missing out on too much of the experience by playing remotely. If anything, it got us excited to visit The Escape Game in Nashville once the pandemic is over! There are a few cinematic moments that truly wowed us, including some crazy set pieces that, when activated, elevate the entire game’s immersion brilliantly! It’s strange to comment on how tactile the room is when we weren’t physically there, but it was cool to be able to virtually interact with so many well built props, and the Jungle Scout ensured we were able to have her manipulate them as we directed. The inventory system is excellent, and items are quickly added and removed as we find and successfully use them, respectively. This keeps the game flow running smoothly and ensures the whole experience is well streamlined. Technical wizardry runs rampant in this room, and is hidden quite well, creating mystical, large scale effects that translate well to the zoom call. As an aside, isn’t it nice to be able to have conference calls that aren’t mind numbing, for once?

The game flows beautifully, as previously mentioned, and searching has been modified in order to keep things running at a good clip, so the puzzling is the star of the show here. The interactions are challenging and logical, and it’s great to see that though the experience has been adjusted for remote play, it remains a fantastic room dense with great puzzles. I really loved that several puzzles still relied on good teamwork to overcome, and the variety certainly allowed for each of us to have our MVP moment! Each stage of the game is somewhat self contained, making each room feel like their own individual meta-puzzles to work through, and this approach works fantastically virtually, and eliminates any dead time from having to direct the avatar to walk back and forth. The climactic puzzle is wonderfully intense, and the touches that combine to build this level of intensity are all insanely cool, even through our computer screens.

Low Points:

We had one slight hiccup when we asked to search a particular part of the room, and were told it was featureless, only to later find there was a very important interaction there we had previously expected to find. Luckily, our GM was able to get things back on track once she realized the error, which was great. One particular puzzle relies on sound, and it’s a great idea in person, but virtually, we were directly informed regarding the important bits, simplifying it a bit more than we would’ve liked. I understand the reason for the modification, but other games we’ve done have been able to translate sounds to their inventories, which would preserve the challenge here.

Verdict:

As a virtual experience, Ruins: Forbidden Treasure is a pretty awesome way to spend an hour with friends, escaping even when we can’t be in the room together. I really appreciated the production values of the adventure, and the intro video is almost worth the price of admission alone! I can’t wait to check out The Escape Game once we’re able to make the trek out to Tennessee, and absolutely recommend escaping this room virtually in the mean time. Book your time with Captain Mac’s Skyward Tours here!

8.5/10 (Great)

Full Disclosure: The Escape Game provided our team with a complementary game.