Bury, Mar 2024
There are any number of zombie themed rooms out there, and unless you make a point of avoiding them I imagine you’ve played several; but Karen is a much more original creature. This is zombie comedy, played for laughs but with a solid and sustained kick of adrenaline to back it up.
That adrenaline comes not from frights but from an overload of puzzles. Zombieland 2 doesn’t swamp you with puzzles to the extent of Compendium’s legendary UI-55 – for comparison, the two of us completed this one with a good chunk of time remaining, which would never happen in UI-55 – but it uses a very parallel structure where you can mostly complete puzzles in any order.
Puzzles and theming alike are of course liberally drizzled in black humour. The centrepiece is Karen herself, a zombie who will seize on your every success and misstep as an opportunity to insult you. This element of the game is a matter of taste, and whether you like it will make a big difference to how much you enjoy the room. I found it entertaining, and was happy to call insults back at her; in fact I’d have preferred a Karen who was sharper-tongued and less scripted. Others may find her off-putting, though the hosts clearly try to adjust her behaviour to suit the team.
The audio and the physicality of a couple of the tasks also helped make this a high energy game. Well-executed humour in a room reliably wins me over, so it should be no surprise I liked this one; I’m aware the style might be a bit ‘Marmite’, but even if you dislike the premise you could always ask for less Karen and just enjoy it as a well presented, slickly designed collect ‘em all game. 