Australia – Escape Room Adventurer

Location: Your Home via the Magic of the Internet!

Players: We recommend 3-4 players

Price: $45 AUD per person (About $32.05 USD at the time of writing)

Time to Escape: 60 minutes

Needs the more money! All the more!

Theme:

From the Virtual Escape website:

Ever wanted to rob a bank? Now’s your chance! You’ve got 60 minutes to steal as much loot as you can.

Bypass security, crack vaults, fill the loot bags and safely escape.

First Impressions:

We always enjoy knocking over banks… in escape rooms, of course! As a puzzling team of Bonnie and Clydes, trying to rob a vault blind is always an intense and exciting adventure. Virtual Escape looked to be a bit different than a usual virtual escape, as it would be played through WhatsApp, which I downloaded especially for this game. I was interested to see how the game would flow through a texting based platform, as we were very much used to seeing our Game Master live and working through puzzles through Zoom. Thanks also to EscapeTheRoomers for inviting us along!

High Points:

For Ben’s Big Heist, we were contacted by our Game Master through WhatsApp, acting as Ben, who was just about ready to get started breaking into his first bank! He needed our help however, as he, like so many other escape game avatars, was completely unable to solve the puzzles on his own! The first couple interactions were straightforward, helping us get used to how we interacted with the game, and then the real challenges began. While some of the starting puzzles threw off the difficulty curve a bit, later puzzles flowed supremely well, and once the game found its footing, the linear puzzling provided some great ah ha moments and clever enigmas! Almost all of the challenges presented by the game are teamwork based, ensuring that every member of the team remains fully engaged with the experience, and allows for multi-level solving that keeps things interesting. Even one of the more banal interactions still created a sense of teamwork that elevated it somewhat over basic math.

Later on in the game, things become much more intense, as time began to run low and we still had a vault to clear! Once we cleared out the bank, (setting a, at the time, record of $4,845,000,) the game wasn’t over, and we had to solve a couple more conundrums before the police arrived. This end game run of “boss level” vaults and a daring, if somewhat silly, escape truly ramped up the stakes and delivered a fantastic level of intensity to the adventure. The final vaults are a choice between the easier level vault for a smaller reward and a more difficult vault for a much bigger reward. Luckily we had time to take on both, and I can definitely confirm that both are a satisfying bunch of multilayered puzzles. Though I liked the more difficult vault more for its truly satisfying solves, the easier vault was still a lot of fun and a close second. Speeding away from the bank was highly satisfying, and receiving our final score was a fantastic way to cap off the experience.

Low Points:

One particular puzzle involved some translation that would be a bit more cumbersome than usual. Our team was very lucky in that one person was able to quickly translate for us, but had we been on our own, this would’ve been a fairly clunky puzzle for us. There were a few math based puzzles, which were banal for us. I know some folks really love math puzzles, but the majority of the people I play with tend not to enjoy them unless they’re really well integrated with the room. If the math was somewhat more interactive, it would be a little more interesting, and while it does present a good teamwork challenge, the presentation leaves a bit to be desired. The game itself started out a little rough, and most of the issues presented in this section are overcome by the second half, so a smoother introduction would definitely help. One puzzle required the use of a QR code, which, as I was already using my phone for WhatsApp, was not readable by me. Luckily, one of our teammates sorted it out and sent the link, but it may be better if the GM could just send the link along. Finally, WhatsApp isn’t quite the best method of presentation for the game, it was fairly wonky overall, and felt like more of an impediment to overcome than anything. Most of the time, I was translating links onto my desktop in order to better experience the puzzles. Zoom or other web conferencing sites have chat functions, so it wouldn’t be hard to change over to a somewhat more intuitive platform.

Verdict:

Ben’s Big Heist has some hurdles to overcome to become truly a great game, but it is still a solid time, and fun to work through on the whole. Enthusiasts who enjoy bank heist rooms that measure how much you can steal will enjoy this the most, but newcomers can still enjoy the room’s clever puzzling and heist based excitement. I recommend checking it out if you’re looking for something a little bit different from the norm. Book your time helping Ben liberate some cash here!

7/10 (Good)

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

Location: Your Home!

Players: We recommend 1-4

Price: $30 per box

Crikey!

Theme:

Each month, Finders Seekers invites you to accept a mysterious mission from the head seer. These “finds” are located in cities around the world and involve high stakes, cryptic puzzling, and shadowy societies! You’ll need a clever mind and some google-fu in order to piece together the puzzles and complete the find! And when you do, you might even receive a reward! This month takes place in Sydney, Australia, land of big dangerous animals that want to kill you!

First Impressions:

This one is a little late, so for background, after we completed the horrendous Mont St. Clair box, we had cancelled our subscription. You can read the linked review for more details, but to summarize, it was really that bad. However, our subscription had apparently recently charged us, so we received one last box. We sat on it for a while, as we had plenty of other excellent games to play though and were wary of the quality of this box, which was originally released in October of 2017.

High Points:

The initial puzzle is a real brain teaser that was truly a pleasure to solve, with satisfying ah ha moments peppered throughout the solve. There are a few more clever interactions we had a good time with, but the rest of the box didn’t really stand up to the great set up that this puzzle promises. There’s an excellent logic puzzle set up with a very high stakes story moment, which requires careful attention to detail and feels rewarding to complete. The fun facts and historical notes that are included throughout the experience make this an excellent game to present in a school based or family learning environment. The experience is blessedly non-linear, which has always been a boon when solving Finders Seekers boxes, and allows the game to prevent becoming bogged down by getting stuck on a puzzle.

G’day from Australia!

Low Points:

This is an older box that has been rereleased without any meaningful update, and it absolutely shows. The props feel much cheaper than more recent boxes, and the whole experience is sparser on the whole. Many of the puzzles are easy to glitch past, even accidentally, and we found that at the end of the game, we still hadn’t used one set of props and were unable to solve one of the more obtuse puzzles but were still able to easily complete the meta puzzle, which was a weird unscramble game wherein buttons marked as hints were one hundred percent necessary for those who do not speak fluent Aussie slang. Luckily, a friend of mine is a true blue Australian native, so this puzzle was very easy for us to complete, but I can see casual solvers having difficulty with this one. It’s basically one step down from having to unscramble or decode words that aren’t from your native language. Most puzzles are fairly basic, and are based off of themes and mechanics that most experienced players will have solved before, and will not be very exciting for newcomers either.

Verdict:

Sydney, Australia was definitely a more finely tuned and well designed experience than Mont Saint Clair, but still doesn’t hold a candle to the Finders Seekers golden period of the Athens, Petra, and Mexico City boxes. The fact that a box from over a year ago that hasn’t been updated in any way was the main offering did not instill enough confidence in me to consider resubscribing either. As my fiancée has noted, this would make a really great homework assignment, but doesn’t really justify its $30 price tag. If you’d like to sign up anyway, you can do so here. If you sign up through our link, we’ll earn credits towards a free box, and can bring you more content! You can read the rest of our Finders Seekers reviews here!

5/10 (Mediocre)

Tag: Australia

Virtual Escape – Ben’s Big Heist (Review)

Finders Seekers – Sydney, Australia (November 2018 Box Review)