Category: 2015 Golden Lock-In

It was kind of like Legends of the Hidden Temple… Except I wasn’t screaming at the TV because some kid couldn’t figure out how to assemble the three freakin piece statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey.

Location: Queens, New York

Date played: November 8, 2015

Team size: 4-7; we recommend 4-5

Price: $25 per ticket, must book at least 4 tickets

Theme & story

The Dungeon of Elements was an Indiana Jones-style tomb raid. There was an old mystical thingy… and you wants the precious… So you need to solve some puzzles to unlock it.

The premise was simple and familiar. Instead of loading the game up with story, the puzzles, setting, and huge set pieces carried us through the adventure. It worked well.

Setting

The Dungeon of Elements was located in the basement of an older building in Queens. The basement itself went a long way towards achieving that old dungeon feel that so many rooms fail to achieve.

Huge set pieces

The large set pieces set this game apart. There were a lot of impressive fixtures in The Dungeon of Elements. All of the big, sturdy, mechanical, aged components made the game feel like it had a gravitas that many games fail to achieve.

At times the feeling was undermined by obviously modern components and a heavy reliance on color changing LED lighting, but these were relatively minor infractions.

Puzzles

The dungeon was split into a few different areas, each themed on the mythical elements of water, fire, air, and earth.

Each element presented its own challenge in the form of a physically interactive puzzle. It worked well because each puzzle felt intimately tied to the element that it represented (with the exception of the fire challenge… But it’s tough to make a safe fire challenge that actually involves fire).

All of this culminated with a massive conglomerated puzzle that required the entire team to solve.

Team size

As with their other rooms, Mission Escape Games, Queens’ website accurately nails their team sizing: The room maxes out at seven people, but they recommend five or six players.

Should I play Mission Escape Games, Queens’ The Dungeon of Elements?

The Dungeon of Elements was a top tier game. It was elegant, big, brilliantly designed, memorable, and engaged the entire team at all times.

Book your hour with Mission Escape Games, Queens’ The Dungeon of Elements, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Full disclosure: Mission Escape Games Queens comped our tickets for this game.

This escape room is temporarily closed. It will reopen in a new midtown location in spring/summer 2019.

In the final minutes of Nemesis, I felt my world crashing, but recovered in the very last moment.

Location: New York, New York

Date played: September 17, 2015

Team size: up to 8; we recommend 4-6

Price: $28 per ticket

Theme & story

You’ve been sent to board a massive space-station that has lost power and is about to fall out of orbit, plummet to Earth, and end all life on the planet. You have 60 minutes to restore power to the station, correcting its orbit or the world ends.

The Nemesis looked exceptional. Every item in the room was on-theme and it was sci-fi in a dark and slightly intimidating way.

The game felt like we stepped into a new world, and it was a fun world to explore.

Intro

We were the first non-tester team to play Nemesis. Derek, the owner of Mission Escape Games, handled our introduction to the game, and it was a bit disjointed. I followed the story line because it was a familiar sci-fi setup, but some of our less nerdy teammates were confused about the goal of our Mission.

I’d venture to guess that because this is a new game, the introductory speech isn’t polished yet, but it’s an important part of the game (especially for less experienced players).

Puzzles

There was a bit of a mixed bag here in the puzzles.

On the plus side, there were no padlocks whatsoever and many of the puzzles were interactions with the space station.

This room was at its best when the puzzles were space station interactions that advanced a story line.

On the not-so-plus side, a couple of these puzzles were excruciatingly challenging. There was one puzzle that was so hard that I can confidently say our team wouldn’t have solved it… And I’m not even sure we would have gotten it with hints… But we accidentally circumvented that puzzle so we’ll never know.

Breakage & accidental circumvention

This game was technology-driven. Almost everything involved a sensor or something digital. Thus there was high potential for bugs, especially for early players.

In one instance we bypassed a puzzle, and didn’t even know it. We did a thing, and another thing opened. It turned out that we did the wrong thing, and had no idea that we had circumvented the hardest puzzle of the game.

There was another instance where we had the right answer, and the device didn’t work. It was a bummer because that happened at a particularly dramatic moment.

Escalation, storytelling, and a climactic moment

Nemesis had a dramatic beginning, largely because the puzzles fit into the story. It had a similarly dramatic ending. When we restored power to the space station with a minute to spare, and the triumphant theme from one of my favorite PS2 era video games started playing in the background, I was elated… More on that elation in a moment.

The middle of the game lost the plot thread. The puzzles existed for their own sake rather than to advance the story.

Nemesis had so many wonderful moments that conveyed meaning and story, a few of the puzzles didn’t feel like they should have made the cut.

A personal drama

This was a special game for me because it was the first domino in my extraordinarily complex marriage proposal to my (now) fiancée, and Room Escape Artist co-everything, Lisa Radding.

Derek graciously hid a small box in the room for Lisa to find. He asked me if I “wanted to know where it would be hidden.” I didn’t want to know anything about the game, so I said, “no.”

He hid the box in the penultimate puzzle of the game… So I became hint happy in the final minutes. I was silently panicking as it started to look increasingly like we weren’t going to get out.

If you’re interested in the full story of the proposal, you should read Lisa’s post, The Escape of the Ring from the Puzzle Box.

Should I play Mission Escape Games’ Nemesis?

The last time we played at Mission Escape Games, we loved the Hydeout, but we thought it lacked a climax. Nemesis did not suffer from this problem.

It had quite a few wonderful moments in it and the overall feel was seductive in a nerdy sort of way. It was intense, a ton of fun, and a game that I will always remember (not all of that has to do with the game itself).

All of that being said, there were moments when the game didn’t work as designed, a couple of puzzles that were far too confounding, and a few elements that felt like they should have been better incorporated into the story. Mission keeps getting better and we keep moving the goal post on what constitutes a perfect game.

Nemesis is a game for experienced players. If this is your first room, you’re going to have a rough time. It’s (mostly) fair to experienced players, but I am reasonably sure that it will offer an insurmountable challenge to first time teams. Mission has a few games that offer a softer learning curve. Give those a try; then face off against the apocalypse space station.

Book your hour in Mission Escape Games’ Nemesis, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Full disclosure: Mission Escape Games comped our tickets for this game.