A deadly virus

This past weekend The Flautist, Naked Man, Amazon, Wendy, myself, and two people who don't yet have creative names on my blog all went to do an escape game called Pathogen.  It is held at a fantastic escape room place here in Toronto that I have been to before, and I have been consistently impressed with its offerings.  This latest one was no exception.

Note that I will be discussing some things about the escape game, so there will be thematic spoilers.  However, I won't discuss any of the puzzles directly, so it shouldn't affect your results, should you attempt it.

The theme of Pathogen is that we are doing a heist in a dystopian future.  There is a deadly virus and we have to break into the place holding it.  The environment felt a lot like the Portal game - futuristic computer panels and graphics combined with tubes and knobs.  A slick mishmash of high tech and functional engineering is how I would describe it.  It works.

In every escape room group you need to figure out how to divide up jobs.  We have a bunch of puzzle experts in the group so I figured I would take the role of large man who whacks things.  You don't have to destroy stuff to win an escape room of course, but sometimes having someone focus on the physical tasks is beneficial.  Plus I take immense glee in throwing myself down dark tunnels not knowing what is at the end and I do not fear dirt nor discomfort.

Naked Man organized the group, and he puts together a good crew.  He certainly wants to set records, and he knows a lot of people who are good at this sort of thing, so getting onto his teams is a good way to experience success.  When I am not around he generally gets to be the one doing the physical tasks, but it is hard to do that in a group I am in because I am already throwing myself down the tunnel and you can just try to catch up.

I ended up being a bit of a hybrid between solving puzzles and doing physical tasks.  I figured out a couple of the puzzles on my own and was part of a team doing others.  As usual after we ended the round there were some puzzles I had absolutely no idea about that other people solved while I wasn't looking - I could probably run the game again and spend half my time doing totally new things.  However, I absolutely got to do the most fun physical part of the game - lasers!  You know in movies when the protagonist is sneaking through a maze of lasers to get to the thing?  I got to do that, on a clock, worried about alarms.  It was magnificent.  It turns out that you can finish the lasers either by being small or by being tall, but if you are neither you are pretty screwed.  Thankfully I have the tall bit all wrapped up and I completed the lasers quickly without any alarms blaring.  I also got to crawl through tunnels and tubes which was excellent.

The theme of Pathogen was brilliantly executed.  I felt wrapped up in the show, to the extent that at one point I thought "We need to get in the elevator and go to another floor in this building"... and then remembered that the 'elevator' is just a room with some display panels, not an actual elevator!  There were 7 possible endings to the game which reflected choices you made throughout, and they felt appropriate when we learned about them all later.  The one thing that marred the experience was that we made one choice but then got the ending sequence for a slightly different choice when we finally finished solving everything.  A small glitch, but one which didn't reduce the fun much.

We finished up in 40 minutes, leaving us 20 minutes on the clock still.  Our score was 4350, which is slightly more than double the average score of 2150, and was the monthly high score.  Go team!

I had a blast, and everyone else seemed to feel the same way.  Finishing with a high score is a rush, and Naked Man and I have spent time since discussing the puzzles we missed and how we might have done better in order to get that score to be an all time record instead of just a monthly one.  A couple conclusions we had were that we needed someone dedicatd to not solving puzzles who would just watch over the whole crew and read stuff.  A manager, essentially.  Also we should cut down on the number of people.  5 or 6 is ideal, but 7 left people just in the way or with nothing to do at some points, and made communication more difficult.

The one trouble with escape games is that they aren't cheap.  They are pretty much the best thing going in entertainment though, so while I don't like the price I certainly want to pay it again.