Tag: comedy

Coming up on Friday: Geekeasy, Pablo’s Hunt and more Handmade Mysteries

Lady Chastity's Reserve comes to East LondonFriday will be busy! This site talks about exit games most of the time and about puzzle hunts frequently. There’s good reason to talk about something different this Friday: a comedy night. Needless to say, not just any comedy night: one themed around The Crystal Maze. That’s interesting.

“Project2 curates Geekeasy ((…)) We populate the bill with emerging and award-winning acts. ((…)) Each month we pick a niche theme and throw some acts at it. Expect musical comedy, stand up, improv, sketch and a Powerpoint competition. This month we’re in The Crystal Maze, with guest comedians, improvisers and musicians competing to win a taxi ride home.”

Project2’s background is improv comedy with a sci-fi theme; the The Crystal Maze theme was announced three months ago so people will have had considerable preparation time. It would be easy to “punch down” but the genuine fandom and love for the genres that the group have shown, plus good reviews from an improv player that this site trusts, gives this site hope that more acts than not can stay on the right side of the fine line: irreverent good, impudent goo-ooo-oood, insolent bad. The show starts at 8pm at The Miller pub in Southwark, London, between London Bridge and Borough.

Other exciting things happen on Friday, too. Handmade Mysteries open an East London location at The People’s Park Tavern pub in the part of south-east Hackney best served by the 388 bus from Hackney Wick, Cambridge Heath or Bethnal Green. This is a slight remix of their original Lady Chastity’s Reserve game played in South London; the larger location permits teams of up to six, rather than up to five, and some extra gags along the way. This site just likes saying “My! Brother! Knows Karl Marx! He met him in the bushes at The People’s Park!”

If you don’t want to leave your house, there’s still fun to be had: as discussed, the 2015 edition of Pablo’s Armchair Treasure Hunt also starts on Friday, though the teaser poster will already get you started. True, there’s a hidden box to be found somewhere in the south of England, but there’s a mighty bundle of research and thinking to be done before you can even start to work out where it is!

Exit game media in early May

Jimmy Pardo, host of Science Channel's "Race to Escape"

(image via The Onion’s A.V. Club, with thanks)

Is this the media face of exit games? (Apart from being, very nearly, the face of an IT director this site knows…) This is the face of podcaster and comedian Jimmy Pardo, who is set to host Race to Escape on the Science channel in the US from July. The press release from channel owner Discovery Communications suggests that “Two teams of three strangers compete in the ultimate test of grace under pressure. Trapped in a locked barber shop, a bar, or a 19th century drawing room, the teams race the clock to solve clues hidden in their room to open the door to freedom and wealth. As the time ticks down, so does the money they stand to win. The first team to escape takes the prize and ultimate bragging rights.”

This show could be really to this site’s taste if it has excellent, play-along-at-home puzzles and focuses on them. Alternatively, if it focuses on the interactions between the team members and the host being sour about the same, it could conceivably be, er, much less to this site’s taste. The world can but wait and hope. It’s certainly a lot closer to exit games in the mass media than the UK has got, other than the long-sought holy grail, two contestants competing at identical one-person exit games on episode 3 of Britain’s Brightest, which aired on BBC 1 on 19th January 2013 if you can make miracles happen.

The UK might get closer very soon, though: on May 12th, the latest series of Big Brother will start in the UK. This site has discussed the possibility of turning the show into an exit game; there’s half a thought that this show might turn itself into an exit game – at least for a while – because of its trailer and accompanying article from the Independent suggesting that this series will have a “timebomb” theme. You’d have thought that a time limit plus a confined space would be ideal territory in which to site an exit game, but the Independent speculates that the motif may be taken as an excuse to play with time in other ways.

Another contender for the title, which you’ve very likely already seen, is the exit game clip from Season 8, Episode 16 (“The Intimacy Acceleration“) of The Big Bang Theory, though you might not have seen the excellent Intervirals post about it, which includes Tweets with behind-the-scenes photos. The game bears considerable coincidences to Room Escape Adventures‘ Trapped in a Room with a Zombie. It’s arguable whether the clip paints exit games in the light of poor value for money, but suggesting that the team escaped in six minutes is a clear hint of the smarts of the team, not a complaint about the game.