São Paulo, Dec 2023
With this game we walked into the venue and asked if they had any immediate availability, preferably for a game playable in English. They did have a room in English, in the sense that they had English versions of the pre-recorded hints and the content itself was language-independent. None of the staff spoke English, and we got through the rules briefing mainly with the help of a helpful multilingual person who attended to be waiting for her daughter to come out of a different room.
Ironically, it’s set on the London Underground, though the design of the carriage and the degree of graffiti on the walls is incongruous if you’re familiar with the real thing. Knowing Portuguese would have made the plot clear, but the gist involved sixty minutes until crash boom sticky end.
This wasn’t actually a linear game, though we played it as if it were. The environment looks fairly sparse, and in fact there are only about ten puzzles to solve. For us it was quite stop-start, with quite a lots of time stuck and quite a lot of time spent trying to find ways of using clues that weren’t actually useful until later on.
Other hesitations about recommending this game are the way it starts in darkness, needing one of its more tenuous solves to get the lights on; and hints that sometimes came too fast and sometimes too slow, though that might be due to the language barrier.
On the other hand, although a couple of the puzzles felt a bit of a stretch, the best were high quality; I thought two in particular were smart and complex combinations of observation and logic, challenging in a good way. Those highlights were spread a bit too thin across the game time to give a strong recommendation to play this, but meant it averaged out to a decent puzzle experience.