• Spy x Family: Mission for Peanuts -- Seemed to be mostly random and skating by on the strength of its license. Not a good sign that the lady with a full copy displayed in front of her wasn't actually demoing the game, just explaining it.
  
• Shadowrun: Takedown -- Boy, I don't know. I think it's a bit too fast-paced for its own good. The whole thing's streamlined down to really basic rolls from an exhaustible pool that represents your action limit, and the players only have 2 real-time minutes to take their entire turns, so you've gotta be fast-talking and passing the active action puck back and forth, and meanwhile the GM needs to have an entire secret map ready to spawn in everything as you reveal new rooms, and the rooms have patrolling guards with basic pathfinding rules and a sight range, and seriously, this is a video game. It's trying to be a video game. Just be a video game. Offload all this nonsense to a computer that can do it faster anyway and won't get overwhelmed trying to keep track of everything. It'd be great as a mobile title. Drop in, get paired up with some randoms, run a 10 minute mission, get out. The game is even intended to have progression mechanics!
  
  Oh and also there's a mechanic where if the GM thinks you need help, they can jump in as a new player, but since they saw the secret map, it causes the whole thing to get reshuffled and after that you just adjucate the reveals and moving the guards around yourselves, I guess, and why is this in there. Does the game need a GM or not?
  
• Betrayal at House on the Hill, 3rd edition -- An interesting update! The haunt grid is gone; now at the start of the game you pick a scenario that answers why your group is at the house in the first place, and you match the omen against the scenario to see what haunt you get. On the one hand, the scenario thing is a needed addition. In place of the previous "well, you're exploring this haunted house Because Reasons", you immediately get a reason, which aids buy-in, and the reasons you can pick fit with the genre very well. "We're ghost hunters", "we all got mysterious invitations", "we are meddling detectives", etc., and since the haunt is keyed to your scenario, you'll get something with a tonal match. On the other hand, I can't shake the feeling that it limits replayability a bit. Getting the same omen in the same room a second time was always long odds, but if you like a scenario, you've got 9 games now before you're guaranteed to see the same haunt, and if everyone knows what's going on as soon as you draw the omen, the game suffers.
  
  One very neat twist, though, is that now some Events can trigger Haunts of their own, overriding the scenario. Which means you could potentially be in for a very bad time on the first tile of the game! Oh, and also, Haunts have been recategorized; sometimes you get the classic single traitor vs. everyone else, sometimes you get the House vs. everyone and there's no traitor, and some Haunts are free-for-alls where only one player can win, making it basically that everyone is the traitor.
  

• Escape From Wonderland -- Not a great room, but not a bad one. Nice work with the theme. I had a very unique and memorable play experience, though. When you start the game, you have to solve an introductory puzzle, which gives you two clues and lets you loose on the rest of the room. My team solved that one in good order... and then bumblefucked around for the next twenty minutes, completely failing to understand what the clues even were, let alone where they were pointing us, so we just randomly moved around and poked every corner of the room, trying to figure what we were even supposed to be solving (which we couldn't do, because we didn't understand the clues at all).
  
  And then once we finally solved the first two clues (in part by finally realizing that some text, which literally each one of us had examined as a possible acrostic and concluded it was not one, was in fact a goddamn acrostic and we were all idiots), with less than 20 minutes remaining... we beat the room. We absolutely tore across the place at blazing speed, solving puzles as quick as we saw them, no doubt aided by the fact that we were all extremely familiar with each and every corner of the goddamn room by that point. The operator said she'd never seen anything like it.
  
• Cabin of the Cackling Man -- This gets my vote for the most innovative experience of the weekend, and I highly recommend it. The story is that you've found yourself in an abandoned cabin with an NES inside, playing a mysterious video game. And when the room begins... there's an NES inside, playing a mysterious video game. I've played rooms before with a similar setup. The game was used for ambiance, or maybe a puzzle solution or two. Not this time.
  
  In this room, the game and the room are intertwined. Actions in the game will cause changes in the room, and vice versa. The room will have hints that you need to progress in the game, and vice versa. You can't treat the NES as a gimmick. You need two teams, a video game team and a room team, and they have to be in constant communication with each other. ("I need it to be night time, can you make it night time?" "Oh! I've heard that name!")
  
  The game itself initially comes off as a Legend of Zelda romhack, but that turns out to be a testament to its actual quality. It quickly shows Final Fantasy influences, blending the two games, and eventually starts pulling tricks that actual NES hardware is incapable of. It's custom software, running a full game that expertly mimics the NES experience. It's a labor of love and I was extremely impressed. (And, for the record, I was on the room team, so I only saw it in bits and pieces.)
  
  The actual room itself is a bit small -- it doesn't even take up the full meeting room that these pop-up jobs usually do, the cabin is a smaller space inside of it -- and one of the puzzles is a bit too finnicky and basically unsolvable without the operator guiding you through what you're supposed to be actually seeing. The rest of the puzzles are great, though, you're doing some really satisfyingly tactile stuff, and overall I can't recommend the room enough.
  
  Oh, and bonus points for the puzzle where the video game is giving you clues you're meant to look up in the actual Nintendo Powers you've been discovering in the cabin, except that I am a tremendous nerd and I wasn't any better when I was 5, so I was rattling off the answers as soon as we saw the clues. I knew I wasn't wasting my childhood!
  
• Space: 2112 -- I always like to do one Escape Room Indy room, and this year, this was it. They've got the major advantage of having a permanent location with bespoke rooms built for the puzzles, letting you actually physically unlock doors and move into new spaces as you progress. In this one, the first room is actually on hydraulics, just so they can shake it when they launch you into space.
  
  They've got this one listed as a challenging room, and it definitely gave us a run for our money, which wasn't helped by a few of the more physical gimmicks not being as reliable as they should have been. I feel like I'm damning with faint praise here; I definitely liked it. All of Escape Room Indy's rooms are really solid and fun experiences with immaculate themeing. This one just... was also that. Of the three I've done -- this, Art Gallery Heist, and Jail Break -- I think Jail Break was my favorite. Space: 2112 has, appropriately, the most high-tech puzzles of the three of them. Do this if you like the sci-fi theme, you'll have a good time.

Dr. Quarex fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jan 13, 2024