Coming to London in July: Defenders of the Triforce

Real Escape Game's Defenders of the TriforceIt’s a cute coincidence that this is the second consecutive post about a fantasy-themed live action team puzzle game, but no more than coincidence; I only found out about this earlier today, with a tip of the hat to Thomas from London Escapists.

The very first post I ever made to dear old Exit Games UK touched briefly on the history of the genre, pointing to Japanese Wikipedia’s suggestion that the first known game, as a commercial enterprise, was run by a company known as SCRAP in Kyoto in July 2007. (Happily, a tenth anniversary celebration is planned.) SCRAP use the English-language brand name “Real Escape Game” for the games they have run, and licensed to be run, around the world, with games notably played in the US, in France and in Spain. They run Real Escape Rooms, which the rest of the world have followed somewhat closely in their format, but they also run Real Escape Games, where many teams participate at once, in a larger location, in parallel. Today the world discovered that one such game is coming to London for three days in July.

Real Escape Game are bringing their latest such game, Defenders of the Triforce, to London on July 14th, 15th and 16th! “This is not an escape room, it is more than that. Solve puzzles together with other teams, in a huge area, all within a set time limit. Interact with classic items and characters seen in The Legend of Zelda series like the Goron, Zora and Kokiri tribes.

Another page on the site says more: “There will be multiple teams during each game, all trying to escape. Players are encouraged to communicate frequently and divide tasks efficiently in order to solve all the puzzles before time runs out. If you are a person who likes answering riddles, solving complex puzzles, or are just looking for a good mental challenge, this event is for you! This is NOT a maze or traditional escape room! It is a fully hosted, story-based escape event designed for puzzle fans and fans of the Zelda franchise.

The game has been running in North America already, and it is suggested that the game does not particularly vary from location to location, so without wishing to prejudge the game, the reviews seem reasonably likely to be representative. You can find non-specialist perspectives from teams who played from many sources including Engadget and The Verge, or you may prefer more specialist perspectives from Room Escape Artist or Escape Room Tips. SCRAP’s games have tended to really split the audience, critically, but this is about as well-received as I can remember any of them being.

If you’re a fan of Zelda, all indications are for a recommendation to book without delay. If you’re not, don’t be put off, but set your expectations to something that’s somewhere between a room escape game and Puzzled Pint; take a look at the reviews and see whether it’s worth the money to you. Either way, many thanks to SCRAP for taking a chance on the UK and I dearly hope that there are many more events like this in the country in the months and years to come.

Introducing Legend Quests

Legend Quests logoLegend Quests describes itself like so: “Legend Quests is a storytelling family theatre game where you get to meet and interact with some fantastical characters and experience a thrilling adventure. Using moving sets, actors, puppets & magic, the audience of around twenty will have to work out how to complete the quest together by solving puzzles, gathering treasure, talking to characters and outwitting monsters.

It takes place in a studio in Rye in east Sussex, so far east that it’s practically in Kent, that has a long history of photo shoots with a particular specialism in fantasy portraits. If you ever wanted to see yourself as a wizard, knight, mermaid or fairy, or something esoteric and multiclass, they have the costumes and sets to do so, and the samples on the site are gorgeous, illustrating why they have such good TripAdvisor reviews. (Which do seem to be for the photo services, not for Legend Quests as such, but are still a very promising start.)

Being honest, I have a half a suspicion this feels near-topic rather than on-topic, but I’ve certainly covered things in the past which turned out to have less puzzle content than this. It’s very interesting in that it takes a stab at asking a number of occasionally-asked questions: could there be something escape-room-like for kids, could there be something escape-room-like for a group of more than a dozen or so and could there be something that attempts to cross the gap between an escape room and a role-playing game. If this were outdoors and wandered all over London, we’d be all over it, so it’s definitely close enough for jazz for me. It’s not at all beyond the realms of possibility to consider the alternate universe where this has taken off like trampoline parks and there is a single escape room somewhere in the UK as a curio.

Legend Quests really intrigues because of what it was intended to be… and, implicitly, what it might yet be at some point in the future. The original Kickstarter appeal was for a “theatrical fantasy dungeon crawl adventure game“, and attracted a lot of impressive names who had agreed to work on a fully-funded project. The game here would have had a series of acted scenes, with the action frozen in time by a narrator, and members of the audience determining what the protagonists did next. (An alternative would have had more in common with conventional role-playing, with players adopting their own characters, but the default game was deliberately a step abstracted from that for greater accessibility.) The Kickstarter didn’t get too far in the end; the subsequent GoFundMe appeal made some progress.

The most recent attempt to bring at least something of the principle of the project to the people was another very interesting try where the crowdfunding campaign didn’t get a great deal of traction. This would have seen the production of physical kits for people to attempt to approximate the experience at home, through the use of evocative soundtracks and players at home acting out the roles using elaborate masks within candlelight, as opposed to full costumes. (Ingenious!)

There’s definitely something there. The designer put out a number of episodes of a fantasy-themed interview podcast, which are well worth listening to, even if they have dried up recently, and comes across very well in his interviews. Fingers crossed that Legend Quests really catches people’s attention somehow before long

A big week coming up

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All sorts of things going on this week (and a bit). Narrowly on the US side of the border with Canada at Niagara Falls, Transworld’s Room Escape Conference and Tour runs from today until Wednesday, with the Room Escape Divas starting things off with a live recording of their podcast that starts very shortly after this post goes live. In Europe, we have to wait a whole week and a day for a counterpart conference of our own at Up The Game in the Netherlands. Both events have sensational-looking lineups of speakers; fingers firmly crossed that people share whatever parts of the content from each one that they can before too long.

If that’s too long to wait, there’s a recording of a webinar from Thursday held by luminary Professor Scott Nicholson, Gábor Papp from clueQuest and Bob Melkus from Fox In A Box. They discuss possible futures for the escape room industry using a scenario-building tool; this is a smart approach for dealing with unknown futures that I’ve seen used elsewhere, such as the UK National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios. (The escape room webinar models a matrix with axes fad/ongoing and luxury/everyday; the National Grid models a matrix with axes of strong/weak economic development and strong/weak priority placed on a low-carbon future.)

On Saturday, the DASH 9 puzzle hunt takes place in London, as well as in the Netherlands and across the United States. Going to the DASH 9 web site, it’s interesting to compare the descriptions of the event from location to location. London players should arrive before 10:45am in preparation for an event starting at 11am, which is a blessed relief in comparison to other locations starting at 9am or 10am. Different locations set slightly different expectations as to how long teams will take to complete the day; some locations say “We expect that most teams will solve all puzzles in ~6 hours”, others quoted “6-7 hours” and London says “~7 hours”, though the London route appears to cover slightly more ground than most. (The London route also includes a DLR ride; I understand that 23 teams are booked for DASH here and predict that 22 will show on the day, of which 21 will want to sit in the front seats and “drive” the train when they get on the DLR.)

One interesting thing to note – and I don’t know whether I’m reading too much into things here – is that the Boston location says that there “DASH 9 will start at 10 AM on May 6th, and last until 6 PM.” DASH events have a reasonable time limit, including travel time as well as solving time, for practicality’s sake for the organisers putting the event on. Last year’s limit was ten hours, and our dawdly team used 9½ of them. (We weren’t outliers in this; out of the 13 other London teams on the tougher tier last year, six of them took even longer than us. It was a long route, and we’re all pretty leisurely.) I wonder whether the Boston location comment suggests that the overall time limit has been cut from ten hours last year to eight this year? If so, then we’ll all need to get our skates on…

Weather forecasts for London for Saturday are quite benign at this point. That’s the really worrying part!