Bedford, Sep 2021
The Vault was for me the second half of Don’t Get Locked In’s Audacious experience, though it’s also available to play stand-alone; and in retrospect I think I would have preferred to play it separately, since as it was we started off already frazzled and short on time after overrunning Return To The Rock.
Either way, your task is straightforward: get into the vault and get the valuables. It has a structure that works well for that too, infiltration followed by a flurry of robbery.
Even though The Vault didn’t win me over, there were some parts of it I liked a lot. Top of the list was a particular lateral thinking puzzle, which we needed a hint to get but which we kicked ourselves for not getting – smart and memorable, hard to see but obvious once you get it, it was a great example of a puzzle that was tricky in a good way. That was a highlight, but not the only place I noticed some clever creativity in the design. And the vault itself may have been low budget, but it had an industrial authenticity to it that worked well.
The flip side was a tendency towards the ‘mind reading’ type of puzzle that’s just a bit too open to interpretation; some ‘gotcha’ searching; and a strong likelihood that most teams will spend a lot of time futilely trying keys in the wrong locks.
It was definitely an improvement on Return To The Rock, though I think suffers from a similar tendency to increase the difficulty via making solutions obscure or adding small gotchas. That’s a shame, because the best moments here reach a markedly higher standard. 