Online, May 2024
After a gap of more than two years, I found myself playing an avatar game again. While the pandemic lockdowns are thankfully a thing of the past, extreme flooding in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul left some of the local venues closed down in a similar way, reliant on offering their rooms in a play from home format to make it through. Currently this is the only room at this venue playable in this style, and it’s offered as a 90 minute experience in expectation that players take longer when not physically present.
Dr Kiefern’s Basement makes a point of being mimetic, meaning that all its puzzles are designed to fit inside the story narrative and make sense in that context. The avatar version therefore needs a rationale for how and why our avatar, trapped and alone in the basement of a mad doctor, could be receiving our instructions; their solution to that is particularly clever.
We were the company’s first English-speaking group for the remote version of the room, and when we played they used a Discord video call with Telescape for inventory and a 360 digital view of the space. The location was atmospheric while being based around familiar furniture such as drawers and filing cabinets.
The naturalistic style of puzzles means an emphasis on search and observation puzzles. These can be challenging to translate to a remote format, since – even with the digital view of room in Telescape – the players’ view is so constrained by where the avatar points the camera. This meant quite a slow start for our game, getting about twenty minutes in before solving anything.
It also has quite a remarkable quantity of text to read. From the quantity you might guess that you don’t need to read it all start to finish, and you’d be right; I’m pointing that out because you’ll have a better experience if you don’t take ten minutes out of the game to slog through it all.
There’s room for some fine-tuning of the avatar hosting style, to strike the difficult balance between pushing players too hard towards the next steps and making it too hard for them to find them. I’m also not sure that Kiefern is a great choice for the remote format; the immersion is weakened by being mediated by the video link, and although the use of Telescape prevents the camera viewpoint from becoming a bottleneck, it’s a fairly linear game anyhow; a room with less realism and more parallel activities might work better.
Still, this is a room that’s notable for the work it puts into world-building and making sure everything makes sense within its premise. If that’s a quality you seek out in escape rooms, you’ll likely appreciate it here. You’d probably appreciate it even more in person than over a video link, but unless you’re planning a trip to Brazil this will provide an approximation of it; and in the current circumstances, might also help the room continue to exist. 