Online, Oct 2021
Lockdown led to a flurry of innovation in online entertainment, and Last Pyramid is part of the small escape room adjacent genre of team challenge/puzzle game – The Crystal Maze remains the obvious point of comparison.
There’s a sci-fi theme and a story about recovering enough crystals to power your host’s spaceship. But underneath that it’s a straightforward format: play a series of mini games, where doing well earns you seconds of time to use in the final challenge. There are more games available than you’ll get through in the hour; you see a nifty electronic map, with different locations labelled, and select which you wish to play. So far so Crystal Maze; an important difference is that in Last Pyramid we weren’t selecting a player to tackle each challenge, but instead all attempting it together. (It sounds like that may be different to how the game was run originally; if so I think switching to whole group participation was a good decision.)
Some puzzles are easier for players with native English skills or relevant cultural knowledge – in particular a puzzle that it sounded like all teams start with, which could mean a bumpy beginning for some groups. That aside, the challenges felt both varied and reasonably fair. I won’t describe too much about the final challenge, partly for spoiler reasons, but also because it wasn’t entirely clear from our playthrough to what extent it was pass/fail versus score-based. I suspect it may be the latter presented as the former; if so that’s a clever way of finishing on a point of high adrenaline.
I also really liked the creativity of a task that required players to search outside the screen for solutions. It would be a fun hour of group solving anyhow, but is definitely lifted by the host, who stays lightly in character and uses that to add a good dollop of humour into the proceedings.
We had a team of six, and that number of people worked fine, so this is an experience better suited to a larger group than is a typical avatar escape room; though I imagine it would feel crowded with many more than that. Oh, and I would be remiss not to mention: you may also win physical prizes, to be sent to you in the post. 