Crystal Maze Online

When escape room websites try to explain what they are to the uninitiated, over and over again they use the same cultural touchstone as their reference: the 90s TV gameshow The Crystal Maze. These days there is of course a live version open to the public in London and Manchester – and now also this online experience, which is entirely fan-made and unofficial. Presumably to avoid IP infringement, it’s also entirely free to play – though to get tickets you’ll need to be very quick off the mark when they release a new set of slots.

This experience is run with as much fidelity to the TV format as possible – given the obvious constraints of remote play and low budget. Your team faces a succession of challenges, with one person (chosen by the team captain) on point for each; there are Mental and Skill and Physical and Mystery challenges, and game zones with familiar themes. Winning a challenge gains a crystal; running out of time means a (virtual) lock-in. At the end there’s a final Crystal Dome challenge to get as many points as you can, with time determined by the number of crystals you’ve won.

Naturally, you won’t be clambering across stepping stones or climbing nets. Although there are Physical challenges they’re only metaphorically physical, and you don’t need to get out of your chair for any of them. Some puzzles are interactive, but the majority consist of a static image on the screen; Zoom’s annotation feature is handy for collaboration on these. These are distinctly different in style to your normal escape room puzzles, and are more like the type of puzzle that might be shared on Facebook – or, for that matter, like the type of puzzles used in the original Crystal Maze. I would absolutely not want to see these puzzles in escape rooms, since they’re often a style where either you see it or you don’t – but in this different format, they work very well.

The difficulty and variety of puzzles is excellently judged. It looks like no team yet has managed a perfect sweep of sixteen crystals, but most teams win more challenges than they lose. (They have twice as many games as they use with any one team, so I guess the host has some leeway in adjusting the difficulty level based on how the team’s doing.)

While I hugely enjoyed the official Crystal Maze live experience, I thought it suffered in comparison to escape rooms for having only one person playing a challenge at a time – the others can shout advice, but still, in your hour experience you may only play two or three of the games. This online experience has the big advantage that all players are involved in almost all the games. Each challenge has its designated player who is at risk of lock-in and who has responsibility for giving the final answer, and there are a couple of games where help is forbidden; but normally, all players can tackle the task together. Purists might object, but for me that was a huge improvement, providing much more involvement for everyone.

It is, of course, an amateur creation with production values to match – but it’s made with a care that absolutely captures the Crystal Maze feel, quite surprisingly so given that we were all playing from our respective homes. The format means an increased focus on mental style tasks even when they don’t have the official Mental label, and that narrows its potential appeal somewhat – though I imagine that’ll be less off-putting for escape room enthusiasts than it might be for many others. It wastes no time in getting you into the game show spirit and keeping you at a nervous excited buzz throughout; it’s free to play but even if it weren’t I’d absolutely consider it worth paying for.