From time to time, Exit Games UK likes to use some of its hard-earned near-topic credit to write about video games – but not just any video games, specifically video games that might be found in the lobby of an exit game to give you something that’s the right sort of fun to do before or after your game. See the review of Codex Bash previously. (For something even more kinetic and hilarious – though rather less practical for an exit game lobby – see its follow-up, Go! Button Power Team!, where the buttons to be pressed are on humans in zentai suits. Special difficulty: these humans have their own silly instructions which may make finding and pressing the buttons a remarkable challenge.)
The recent meeting of the Haberdashery Collective was tremendous, featuring all manner of unabashedly silly party-style games in an excellent, inclusive, friendly atmosphere. The game discussed today, that this site experienced for the first time at the very end of the session, is Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It’s a PC game, distributed via Steam, in which one player has access to a digital version of a suitcase-style bomb, and the rest of the team have access to a printed bomb defusing manual. The bomb has a number of modules on it, each of which hosts its own miniature puzzle. Through accurate description of these modules, and also other information about the composition of the bomb, the remainder of the team can look through the instructions for how to solve that puzzle and convey the solution technique for each module back to them. The instructions are fairly convoluted, but only just convoluted enough to be fun. It’s a game of observation and communication. Oh, and make sufficiently many mistakes or take too long and the bomb will, well… do what bombs do.
The bomb is procedurally generated to be different every time; there are fourteen different types of module, and some are harder than others. You can dial the level of difficulty up or down; a relatively easy bomb will have few modules and ones which are relatively simple to solve, a more complicated bomb will have modules up the go-go and pose real-time multitasking challenges to test your time management while you’re doing everything else. Maybe once you’ve cracked each sort of module twenty or thirty times, the appeal might start to fade, but the game walks the tightrope between high intensity and low stakes with style. This would make it a really suitable game for an exit game lobby; it’s almost instantaneous to pick up and play and very easy to come into and drop out of.
You can get a sense of whether this a game that you’d enjoy playing yourself by looking at the instruction manual and looking at videos online of people playing the game. Arguably that’s a little spoiler-y and it’s better to go in completely cold – think of the joy of being immersed to brand new games to figure out within seconds on The Crystal Maze – but there’s something of a difference between seeing a game played and getting to play it yourself. There’s a 10% discount available on the (reasonably small) price of the game for about another 24 hours or so right now, with a note that no further discounts will be planned for the next six months, so now might be a great time to act if you’re interested.
As a cultural point, this site thoroughly approves of the renaissance of resilience-building games. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.“, as Samuel Beckett would have it. To an extent that’s every video game, but there’s a difference between resilience at problem-solving and resilience at reflex-testing, noting that almost all games have elements of both. On top of that, apparently Keep Talking… is compatible with certain VR headset development kits, which must be an absolute blast, no pun intended. If, on the other hand, you know about Keep Talking… already, the physical exit game with most similarities to the digital game is very probably Agent November‘s Major X Plow-Shun game, which gives you a physical box of tricks to play with.
Lastly, and unrelatedly: congratulations to the UK team in the World Sudoku Championship, whose eighth place is a national best for five years, and particularly to David McNeill for defending his world championship in the over-50s division. Take this great form into the World Puzzle Championships and puzzle ’em dead!
There’s a cheap-ass version of this idea on the latest Jackbox Party Pack called Bomb Corp where up to four of you must work as a team to defuse bombs, except everyone’s got different pages from the instructions on their phone so communication and speed logic is the key. My head started hurting around the time they introduce “instructions as written by a child” and “cut all the wires from right to left, except for green ones which should be cut left to right,” “there is a typo in the previous page” and so on.
This seems to have been popping up all over the place and I’d definitely like to play it some time.
It fits one of my favourite parts of escape rooms – where two people have to work together to solve a problem, which got me thinking about whether you could actually incorporate it into an escape room. That in turn made me think about the fact that you could play that part of the escape room twice and still enjoy it. Which led me on to the general question of how many reusable puzzle pieces you could have in a room and at what point you could make a fully replayable room.
Searching lends itself well – choose fifty hiding places and use ten of them. Have a program which chooses the ten and then the resetter follows the instructions about what goes where (a clever enough program could even have logic to make the game flow in different ways). Similarly if you had a number of padlocked boxes and different clues that could be used to solve them (for bonus points – resetting the padlock code for each game!).
The questions in my mind are:
(a) would this introduce too many mistakes in resetting the game?
(b) would it actually be fun to play a second time? If it’s exactly the same room, would that lose a lot of the excitement, even if the puzzles were all different (e.g. knowing there’s a second room through the wall).
Replayable games seem to be the holy grail of escape companies. The Crystal Maze looks like it could plausibly be replayed (although it would clearly be very different a second time), but apart from that, I don’t see anything remotely close. Breakout’s Wanted has two scenarios, but I think they’re effectively co-located games rather than the same game being replayable.
Sorry – a bit of a digression from the original topic!
I’d imagine the re-playability issue boils down to to the fact that if you’re going to build twice as much into a room to make it playable twice, you’re better off making two rooms, either co-located or cycling them out every 6 months or so.
This videogame looks great, and is a no-brainer given I already have a VR headset for it…
Party at Dean’s!