rumpelsnorcack

I have not written up an escape room for ages despite having done rather a lot of them - I think I'm up to ~65, including online ones, although those no longer count for TERPECA so I might have to list them separately. Anyway. This is my most recent, fitted into a flying visit to Sydney (fly over first flight of the morning, attend all day conference, check into wrong hotel, check into right hotel (same brand and area but with one crucial word different!), do escape room, sleep, attend all day conference, fly back on last flight of the evening).

Unstoppable!

You are a special forces group, code-name ‘Skyfall’ from the Australian National Security Agency and there is a highly classified mission for you:

You have received intelligence that a terrorist has placed bombs containing a mutated virus on a train soon to depart from Sydney.

With limited clues, you must discover which train it is, and defuse the bombs as soon as possible. You must act quickly to prevent a tragedy…

You're shown onto a station platform and given a credit card, and the first puzzle is to work out which train to catch and buy the right tickets. Eventually, you board the waiting train (an actual carriage) and, if you're successful in defusing the bombs, there's an extension to the room wherein you have to stop the train. The theming and the set were fantastic, the puzzles were good, and the whole thing was a lot of fun. My only negative was that the walkie talkie was unreliable - sometimes when you held down the button it transmitted your voice, sometimes it did nothing, and sometimes it did nothing and then beeped frantically for quite some time, arrgh. Lots of physical puzzles (I particularly enjoyed plotting a train route with multiple restrictions and working out a toilet flush code) and nifty details. It's an 80 minute room and I got out with just under 2 minutes to go.

I did ask for a couple of hints (two puzzles where I got stuck and then a third I was working on and got a voiceover telling me a bit more than I expected) and I did have to get a staff member to come in for the last puzzle, which was impossible to do alone. I have solo'd about ten escape rooms now and this is only the second one where I've had to get someone in, although there are certainly ones that would have been easier with someone else (I am thinking of the one where I had to do a DDR game with controls that were just slightly too wide apart for me to do anything other than lunge repeatedly, also the one in which the lights ran off a generator that had to be hand-cranked intermittently to avoid plunging everything into darkness). This one was similar, in that it had four controls that determined the movement of a point on a screen, each moving it in one direction, but there was no way I could reach more than two of them.

This is the first room I've done at Mission, although my sister's done one of theirs with a live actor (which I really want to try), and I liked it a lot. I am still on a UK escape room group and they recently advertised an escape room on an actual train, which sounded fantastic; this might not have actually been moving but it definitely had some of the same vibes.