Madness is a real-life escape room livestreamed and played through an avatar, created by Exit The Room.
Format
Style of Play: real-life escape room livestreamed and played through an avatar
Required Equipment: computer with internet connection
Recommended Team Size: 2-4
Play Time: 60 minutes
Price: $141 per team
Booking: book online for a specific time slot
Description
This is a standard avatar adaptation of a real-life room where players view a shared video feed and give instructions to an avatar.
Hivemind Review Scale
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Brett Kuehner’s Reaction
- + Enthusiastic and energetic gamemaster, despite it being 4am their time
- + Sets were functional, though not spectacular
- + Inventory system worked well
- – Puzzles were fairly generic
- – Puzzles lacked connection to locks, so numbers had to be tried in multiple locks
- + Many props were attractive and came across well on camera
- – Tech problem on one puzzle, but gamemaster was able to work around it quickly
- – Not great for larger teams, so cost per person is likely to be high
Cara Mandel’s Reaction
I’ll start by saying that I appreciated our game avatar’s enthusiasm. I could tell they were trying very hard to provide us with an enjoyable experience. I also truly appreciated them running a game for a US time zone-based team. I believe it was 4am for the gamemaster. Unfortunately, this game fell a bit flat for me overall. The story was pretty thin and I wasn’t entirely sure what the premise was supposed to be. I know it had something to do with a doctor who was up to no good. I felt the puzzles were pretty lacking and there was an overabundance of 3-digit and 4-digit padlocks. This certainly wasn’t my least favorite remote escape game, but I can’t say that I’d recommend it with so many other stronger options currently available.
Matthew Stein’s Reaction
Madness nearly drove me to madness with its mundanity. In a style typical of Central/ Eastern Europe circa 2015, this game consists of a slew of random, generic puzzles which have been somewhat haphazardly thrown into a loosely themed, secondhand store-decorated room. Our gamemaster’s eager attempt at a helpless avatar character didn’t particularly contribute to the remote game experience, though major kudos to him for being up at 4am his time to run the game at a US-friendly time!!
Theresa W’s Reaction
I have to give major props to Exit the Room: they have US-friendly bookings, even though they’re across the globe and are gamemastering at 4am. Beyond this, the game really fell flat in every sense. The story didn’t seem to make sense — we were out drinking with our professor, and ended up in a psych ward? The puzzles made sense, and the solutions were clear, yet there were multiple places to input the same code.
Disclosure: Exit the Room provided the Hivemind reviewers with a complimentary play.