The Cube: Dexter

The Cube seems to be Skopje’s largest escape company: two venues a short walk from each other, with two games at each. I believe their Saw and Indiana games are purchased designs, whereas newer games Mansion and Dexter are their own creations. Dexter was the only one I could get a slot for at short notice, and while I’d love to be able to praise it, we came away underwhelmed.

The theme is of course based on the TV series Dexter, and your job is as detectives trying to find evidence to arrest the titular serial killer. In practice it’s more a matter of solving puzzles until you reach the last one and get the code for the exit door.

The room design works hard to include a variety of gadgets and interesting mechanisms to add variety to the lock and code puzzles, and has some good ideas that fit the theme well. However, these weren’t always reliable, with the equipment for one important puzzle being essentially unusable (after the game our host spent quite a while trying to demonstrate it and eventually got it to display something that could be made out if you squinted at it just right). Use of contemporary electronics had the usual issue of not being locked down to just the intended use, meaning built-in functionality becomes an accidental red herring.

More generally, I felt that many small details of the decor and design made for a slightly dispiriting game, where there were a great many items scattered around, such that you spend a lot of time looking at irrelevancies and searching empty corners to no avail, but you can’t ignore the distractions and focus on the key elements because the game does actually require you to search everything and find uses for a couple of the items you’d normally assume weren’t important.

We had a frustrating game in many ways. There were a lot of small details and a couple of large ones that made Dexter hard to enjoy; even so, I can imagine other teams playing it with less friction than we encountered. Either way, I’d suggest picking some of Skopje’s other games ahead of this one.