Nogame: Psylab

It’s clear that some effort went into the decor and atmospherics here, with some dark and murky corridors – and a lot of blood splatter on the walls! The game itself was a bit of a disappointment. Some of the atmospheric videos that formed part of the game (uncovering them during the game was a nice touch) told a horror story, but were a little misleading sometimes, unintentionally giving us a couple of false leads.

We really couldn’t have hoped to find what we needed to get the lights working as it was so dark, so it’s a bit of a relief that the lights eventually came on thanks to our game-masters. Unfortunately, they weren’t really able to help us when the batteries we found were so duffed-up they failed in the radio, or the atmospheric ghostly message we were supposed to see in the mirror actually booted up to a standard tablet screen.

The most challenging puzzle in the game was relatively simple, but unfortunately we couldn’t tell if we had enough pieces to solve it or not – so we wasted quite a bit of time trying out various theories on it before being told to come back to it later.

Overall, this was a frustrating experience with a few nice decor elements. It would really benefit from a retest of all the puzzle elements, with a view to making them solvable. Our games-masters clearly had higher expectations of the game than our experience, but for now at least there are better games to play in Riga.