Yerevan, Jul 2024
I looked at the name of this game and assumed it was a story inspired by the Matrix… but no, as we discovered on arrival, the premise is actually that there’s a missing child named Neo, and you’re investigating his bedroom to try to solve the mystery.
Honestly, if I were a child living in a bedroom as drab and run-down as this, I’d have run away from home. This is an escape room that’s suffered from the passage of many teams before us, with damage to decor and puzzle items, including a couple of broken pieces of furniture left in a corner. For the most part that didn’t impact on the actual puzzles, though one suffered from having digits that were barely visible any more; and the step that might once have been the coolest moment of the game no longer seemed to work.
Other than that, the sequence of puzzles broadly worked fine, though had little to link them to each other or the story. It’s a linear structure, though there’s also a bonus search element: there are five stars hidden around the room, each of which will give you three additional minutes of time, if you tell the host you’ve found it. The stars were just little stickers from a stationery shop; one of them had fallen off, and when we tried to tell our host we’d found some of them, there was silence on the walkie-talkie.
I’ve played more frustrating games than this one, and more broken ones. It was… fine I guess, given very low expectations of design and decor, maintenance, theming and hosting. It was playable, the lighting level was reasonable, the puzzles were logical enough and not particularly ambiguous. It even had a story resolution that was more meaningful than, ‘and now you’ve escaped!’ – although the resolution didn’t leave me feeling any warmer towards the game. But debatably clearing that very low bar isn’t sufficient reason to play it. 
