Category: SCRAP

The reading of Dr. Mad’s will was a tragic event.

Location: New York City, New York (Traveling Game)

Date played: January 26, 2016

Team size: 6; we recommend 6

Price: $29.50 per ticket

Theme & story

Things started out well enough.

A charismatic and energetic man emerged on stage and explained to us:

“50 years have passed since the death of Dr. Mad, a physicist known as the greatest genius of the last century. Rumor has it that he uncovered the secret to human prosperity, but passed away before revealing it to the world. In accordance with his last wishes, his will was sealed for 50 years following his death. And now the time has come for it to be opened. Many mysterious clues lie hidden within, along with the following challenge —
‘Can you unravel the mystery of my life’s work?'”

The setup was clever, fun, and certainly had enough meat on it to sustain an hour long puzzle adventure.

With a quick look around the room I could tell that the game was set up in the same manner as other SCRAP mass events. I wasn’t titillated by the setup, but SCRAP’s last mass event, Escape From the Walled City, was a step in the right direction, so I had hope.

The clock started, we opened our packet of materials, and my hope died a swift death over the course of the following 15 minutes.

Homework

Wordy and tedious, the puzzles mostly felt like homework.

SCRAP always works in a few puzzles that are genuinely cool. That was true in Dr. Mad, but they were few and not everyone experienced them.

The rest was a grind.

Staging

The game had two rooms that we had to earn access to. Our gamemaster went out of his way to stress how observant we needed to be in those rooms and that there was an experiential component to them.

While we did need to be mildly observant to find a few things in each room, they were storage closets. When we actually attempted to search the room, we found an assortment of items belonging to the restaurant/club that was hosting the event.

There were puzzles; there was no environment.

Solution

When time ran out, we had about three puzzles remaining. However, we had actually guessed the final answer to the game about 20 minutes in.

And we wrote it on our answer sheet.

It was an actual cliché.

Later in the game we became confused and modified it by adding an additional word. We never would have counted it as a victory, but if Escape from the Werewolf Village had a deeply obtuse solution, The Crazy Last Will of Dr. Mad had the most painfully obvious one.

Déjà vu

Back in June 2014, I wrote my very first escape game review on my personal blog. Having played quite a few games, I fell in love with them. Then I played one that I absolutely hated. That game was SCRAP’s mass escape game: Escape from the Werewolf Village.

To pull a quote from myself:

“My big concern is that there were people in that room who were doing a room escape for the first time and think that Escape from the Werewolf Village is representative of all room escapes. If this were my first, I am not sure I’d have gone to a second one.”

It’s now 2016 and pretty much everything I wrote about Escape from the Werewolf Village applies to The Crazy Last Will of Dr. Mad. However Dr. Mad was a worse experience because the escape game industry has evolved dramatically since those early days.

Culture gap

By playing escape games in six countries, I’ve learned that expectations shift from culture to culture.

I wonder if something is getting lost in translation from Japanese culture to American culture.

Should I play SCRAP’s The Crazy Last Will of Dr. Mad?

I have a deep reverence for what SCRAP has done for escape games in the United States. They produced the first escape game in the US. They have also created a few of the most memorable and incredible puzzle experiences I have ever experienced.

At the same time, their games are tedious to a fault and comically difficult (no one won). Their mass escape events are a poor ambassador for their permanent room escapes and the industry at large.

The Crazy Last Will of Dr. Mad was supposed to be a two night event, but they had to conglomerate the games due to poor ticket sales. Perhaps it is time for SCRAP to rethink their approach to the US market.

Full disclosure: SCRAP comped our tickets for this game.

Room escapes are one thing, expectations get a bit higher when you’re tasked with escaping a minor league baseball stadium.

Plot

“The titans are coming, and they’re hungry. Based on the manga megahit, Attack on Titan, the newest Real Escape Game (REG) takes players to a world inhabited by giant, humanoid creatures that live for no other purpose than to make a snack of all of us. The high walls of the stadium are the only thing keeping you safe… for now. Experience the latest edition of SCRAP’s interactive storytelling and puzzle-solving games, ¨Escape from the Walled City,¨ on a scale never seen before. Join thousands of other players as you decode clues inside a real stadium! Each REG requires participants to use their best detective skills as they race against the clock. Be warned, though: survival isn’t easy, and teamwork will be essential if you hope to survive. Escape or not, the game is going to be killer! This event will be held in stadiums in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. After already hosting over 40,000 players in the US to date, the SCRAP team is excited to present a new project with such a grand scope, keeping them at the forefront of live escape entertainment!”

Mass Escape Games

SCRAP, the folks who imported real life escape games to the United States, brought their latest mass escape game to New York. Last year SCRAP’s mass game, “Escape from the Werewolf Village” became the very first room escape that we reviewed over on my personal blog TheGeekWhisperer.com.

Lisa and I put that review together, and later created Room Escape Artist, out of a genuine love for escape games, and a fear that subpar games would turn people off from the experience. We wrote:

“My big concern is that there were people in that room who were doing a room escape for the first time and think that Escape from the Werewolf Village is representative of all room escapes. If this were my first, I am not sure I’d have gone to a second one.”

So is this mass game better? Absolutely. Escape from the Walled City is an improvement on nearly every level when compared with Escape from the Werewolf Village, but is that enough?

Stadium

Being on the field of a stadium is fun. Playing a game that’s spread across the field and the stands is also pretty damn cool.

In Werewolf Village, the room itself was irrelevant to the story. In Walled City, the stadium represents something in the story. The size of the facility also greatly increases the distance between things. If you don’t like to move, then this isn’t the event for you.

That being said, I think that a lot more could be done with the stadium besides adding lots stairs and putting distance between things.

And… The field was covered in crap. It wasn’t SCRAP’s fault… but it was still kind of gross.

Story

This game has a reasonably cohesive story, even if it isn’t entirely compelling. In Werewolf Village, the story was laughably abstract. Walled City’s story is a lot more tangible and easy-to-follow.

The story still doesn’t create a believable fiction.

Attack on Titan Tie-In

I’m not an Attack on Titan fan; however, if they substituted a fictional world that I cared about, say Firefly, I think I would have been disappointed.

All mechanics lead to a password to advance, and the passwords were goofy in the context of the story that SCRAP was trying to tell, shattering any fiction that the game attempted to build.

Puzzle Quality

In typical SCRAP style, the game is made up of mostly written logic and word puzzles.

The vast majority of those puzzles were junk puzzles. SCRAP games are always loaded with a heavy volume of puzzles that feel like homework. They aren’t hard, and they aren’t fun.

There were three more physically involved puzzles in this game that were brilliant, and unique. However they tied back to something that wasn’t fun.

Final Puzzle

This was my third SCRAP game, and I hated the final puzzles to the previous two games that I played. This latest one was marginally better, but still very obtuse.

My gripe with SCRAP is that their games are all structured the same:

1. Battle through a pile of junk puzzles with a few cool ones peppered in
2. Struggle with a obtuse final puzzle
3. Lose

They seem to pride themselves on their comically low escape rate, but it’s a bit dishonest. They are a company that likes to design inescapable rooms with a tolerance for error. The teams who do escape are anomalies.

We got to the last puzzle with 25 minutes remaining, and ended up with 58% of the last password derived from a method that wasn’t what the designers intended.

The most significant way that Walled City improved upon Werewolf Village was that you knew whether you’d won or lost when the game ended. That may seem trivial, but it’s a big deal.

Should I play SCRAP’s Escape from the Walled City?

This game is a valiant effort at making a cohesive mass escape game. It’s a huge leap forward when compared with Escape from the Werewolf Village, but it’s just not quite enough of a leap to make it worth playing.

The stadium was fun, the aforementioned three great puzzles were entertaining, but they were drowned out by the sea of junk puzzles, and a game that wasn’t epic enough to warrant its setting.

The US cities that this game visits — New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — all have vibrant room escape scenes, and there are so many better places to get locked in for an hour.

When our game was over, our team packed up and went to play a regular escape game on Long Island.

Going into this, I didn’t think that mass escape games were ever going to be worth playing. I’m still not a believer. However, I do have hope that SCRAP might one day change my mind… They just need to figure out how to break away from this structure that they are so committed to.