Online, Aug 2020
The way a gamemaster operates a physical escape room can make it or break it, and that goes triple when playing via a remote livestream. Temple was unfortunately one where the style of avataring significantly detracted from the game.
First impressions were great, for both the game and the host. The latter had an adventurer’s hat and a high-energy attitude, and when he brought our camera feed through from a plain corridor to the jungle-filled room, it felt like we’d been led into a different world. In addition, there’s a very slick webpage that illustrates the room layout – I’d call it an inventory system, but it was more focused on providing an overview of the space than listing the items that we’d found.
Temple appears to be a bought-in design, in that some of my teammates had previously played another version of it in the US, also via remote livestream; and I thought the game play felt like a purchased design in some ways, such as in having a couple of large tech-led set-piece puzzles.
My frustration with the avatar was primarily that he seemed to lead us through the room to a considerable extent, and in a particular order. He had a habit of leaving the camera pointing at whatever he thought we should look at next, rather than letting us explore; at one point even ignoring us when we wanted him to use a code on a lock, and instead pushing us hard towards a different set of clues. (As later became obvious, that was because he knew that we were trying the right code on the wrong lock.) The result was a very passive feel to the game. I suspect he noticed that we were disengaged and tried all the harder to be entertaining and exaggerated in his patter, but since that didn’t address the problem it simply got wearying.
We finished in a bit over half an hour, a low time that reflected both the unwanted handholding and also a relatively low quantity of content in the game. With different handling i think it would have been a pleasant but short game with the attractive set being its best selling point. I’d still quibble over some minor things – such as putting a puzzle on a padlocked container, when the solution to the puzzle unlocks a completely different t padlock elsewhere – but nothing too severe, and I’d have enjoyed playing it in person. Hopefully as Escape Hotel get more practiced at running avatar games, they’ll get smoother at letting the players take the lead. 