Twelfth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

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Re: Puzzles - Real Escape Game (リアル脱出ゲーム)

[(Anonymous)]

Tried a (Japanese) escape room, where you (and several hundred other attendees) visit a theme park after dark, run around all the attractions, and solve puzzles to get out. Event's still running, so I'll be a little vague on the mechanics to avoid spoilers.

https://realdgame.jp/ (japanese website)
https://realescapegame.jp/ (english-friendly, but only includes more traditional escape rooms)

This particular escape room had us playing the role of rookie spies sent to infiltrate a party hosted by villainous arms dealer Mr. Peace, who's using it as a cover to sell Moonshine, a chemical weapon that turns you into the Hulk, to a rival country. We're not supposed to get involved - but in the fully-acted introduction, the spy organization's first attempt goes horribly wrong (seriously, Crash, what made you think holding a gun to Mr. Peace's head was a good idea?) and now the rookies are on the case!

As it turns out, doing a Japanese escape room when your working knowledge of Japanese is limited to 'omizu kudasai' and 'yabai, yabai' isn't the best idea. My teammates did most of the hard work, while I navigated us around the park and offered the occasional helpful insight like 'Why did we get this piece of paper if we aren't going to use it?' and 'Wait, does anyone on this team know how to count?'

That being said, most of the puzzles were not all that hard if you did know Japanese. Mostly paper-based, but with some fun little physical puzzle tricks like folding origami to reveal the answer or sliding cut-outs to match each other. On the other hand, I hated the final two puzzles - you needed to use the story thus far to fill out 'actions' you wanted to take (i.e. you had a word bank and 'A [participle] B [participle] C' blanks, so you could write things like 'we will ride the merry-go-around' or 'Mr. Peace will throw the moonshine'), but the actions were so open-ended and the correct answers so ultimately stupid that it didn't really feel satisfying to solve them.

If you got to the penultimate puzzle, you received the Moonshine (a yellow glowstick), and if you solved the final puzzle, you received the Moonshine antidote (a blue glowstick). Was fun having everyone meet up again for the closing ceremony and seeing how many people got to the end - I think they said they had about a 33% finish rate. Very much geared towards casuals, but still a really fun event to do with other people.