The Alley: The Last Hand

We walk into the lobby and it looks so nice. There are lockers for your stuff, free snacks and coffee. The toilets are super clean and offer free sanitary pads and tampons, which is a first for me. How lovely!

The room looked great and the puzzles were good and immersive. If you are a search fan, you are in for a treat! It felt as if we spent as much time searching as we did solving. All the searching leaves a lot for people to do if you are more than 2, but the room is a bit short on actual puzzles and while still being a multi linear game in some places, it bottlenecks several places and especially towards the end. 

We were two people, which seemed like an appropriate number. 3 or four could have been okay too. We did enjoy the room but there are some downsides to the experience that made me give it only 3 1/2 stars. 

There are some audio clues of puposefully bad quality which I found really hard to hear/comprehend in combination with the ambient music in the room. 

The room is in English, and although it is not my mother tongue, I feel quite proficient. One puzzle uses the term "nodes" when they might have meant numbers/digits, but it made me really insecure whether I was in the right track, so beware of "lost in translation"-kinks.

I will definitely mention the automated clue system as a con. This means that there is no gamemaster to guide you, the clues are fully automated. 

The system gives generic clues at specific points in the game. Sometimes you will get a clue to something you already have figured out, but to move on, you have to wait for the timer to give you the clue you actually need. Also; you risk getting the solution to a puzzle rather than a nudge in the right direction.

While it worked okay for us in another room, it caused us problems in this one because it is not geared to help you with unexpected occurances. If you have none if those, this clue system can work, but we were left for the last 1/4 of the game stuck with nothing to do. It might have helped the whole experience if we had been told about the clue system before playing, but we were not. This meant that I was quite frustrated with the GM (the mechanics) for not helping us when we were clearly in need (I was actually worried that something had happened to our GM, because who would just sit there and watch us waste our time? Turns out: no one did!)

Missing a gamemaster for appropriate and personalised hints and nudges was one thing, but we were also a bit thrown off when nobody greeted us after the end of the game. We had to just walk out by ourselves and wait in the lobby for the host, to whom we could then tell how we did - he had no idea if we made it or not. He did go through the last puzzle with us afterwards though, so we could see what would happen if we hadn't got stuck due to a misunderstood coincidence.

I asked why they opted for this clue system and the host mentioned that it gives all teams the same possibilities and therefore getting on the record board is fair game for all, plus it rules out personal errors. 

The problem with this, for me, is that I don't play to compete with teams I don't even know and I don't care about score boards. I play to have fun. Also, I didn't even see a scoreboard in the lobby. I realise that good GMs are hard and expensive to train, but they are so much better than mechanics AND they will be able to help with unexpected occurances. 

I suspect that they chose this solution to be able to run all their rooms at the same time with a minimum of employees. 

Knowing this in advance, you might enjoy playing at The Alley more than I did.