Rotterdam, Apr 2024
Breakout have an interesting location at the top of The Machinist, a historic building that used to be a naval academy. Our game was built in a converted attic space, with old floorboards and ominous nooks and crannies that immediately gave the experience a quality of atmosphere that’s difficult to achieve in standard commercial premises.
The Caretaker is as it sounds a creepy game, involving a kidnapped student who you need to rescue. The challenge for companies using that sort of premise is that it’s not normally possible to have an actor for whoever you’re trying to rescue, meaning you can usually expect at the quest ending to find only a pile of plastic bones; this game uses technology to deal with that in a more interesting and hopefully less grim way.
I found this room enjoyable, atmospheric and interesting. That’s curious, because some of the puzzle ideas were things I’d normally dislike – for example, a pencil and paper task, a potentially ambiguous maths equation, something involving a chess board and a type of puzzle I can’t mention without spoilers. We also struggled at several points and needed at least three hints to progress.
Even so, somehow it just worked. Each time we did take a hint we kicked ourselves over what we’d failed to notice; the puzzle logic was retrospectively very clear. The delivery of the hints was via a cool effect. I liked the striking way they displayed both our progress through the puzzles and how much time we had left. The authentic setting came together smoothly with the audio and effects to create a convincing world. And although several puzzle elements seem unpromising, in combination they were used to create quite original and challenging puzzles. 
