Online, Aug 2020
Escape Masters in Wellington have a plethora of games, and I selected their serial killer theme mainly based on timing. This follows the classic setup of waking up in the grisly den of a murderer, with an hour to solve your way to freedom before he returns to finish you off.
This was a puzzle-driven game with nothing for nervous players to worry about; although the premise told us that the serial killer would return at the end of our time, that was a very abstract threat. Theming was conveyed by blood splashes and plastic body parts and a couple of gratuitously gruesome asides in written clues.
Gameplay was fast-paced, with plenty of puzzles that mostly resolved to three digit padlock codes. I believe it was quite non-linear, though of course when we’re sharing a single livestream there’s limited scope to work in parallel. They use an inventory system based in Google Drive, which had that platform’s usual frustration of being fiddly to view multiple items in different tabs, but which did dynamically update as we found new items. Even so I didn’t spend much time looking at it, since that tended to mean missing what was going on on the main screen.
The flurry of three digit padlocks did mean we found ourselves trying some codes on multiple locks – or rather, asking the avatar to do so, which makes things slower. But the majority of the locks were marked in ways that hinted at which clue items were relevant, which avoided most of the potential pain there.
Our avatar ran the game well in most respects, though he did show existing knowledge of the room in a way that weakened immersion – for example, telling us that there was nothing in a drawer without actually opening it. He also seemed to be aiming to be purely a pair of hands for us to direct, and I thought that made for a drier, less involving game; I’d have far preferred him to allow a little more personality into his role, whether his own or that of an in-game character.
Whether because of that or because the puzzle ideas mostly felt fairly familiar, I found Serial Killer enjoyable without being particularly gripped by it. There were no particular points of frustration or gaps in the logic, but also little that makes it stand out from the other two dozen remote avatar games I’ve played. That said, it was well run and provided a solid sequence of puzzles to work through, and will go down well with any teams who get a buzz out of seeing padlocks pop open. 