London, Apr 2022
The third game from Enigma Quests opened shortly before the pandemic, with the result that I was still thinking of it as a new game and was surprised to realise that it’s already over two years old. The scenario here is that you’re trying to defuse a submarine’s nuclear missile before it’s launched.
For this game there’s not a padlock in sight; everything is based around physical and electronic manipulation, with control panels and wires and switches and screens and valves. And as an extra complication, simply getting to the missile isn’t enough: you need to deactivate it correctly via a complex procedure, and on completion you find out whether you’ve won or blown up.
Although I thoroughly enjoyed the first two games at Enigma Quests, I felt that Mission Wavebreak somewhat missed the mark. One reason for that was the relatively plain decor – the actual game components looked great, as did things like the connecting doors, but the overall space felt more like a room containing submarine paraphernalia than the inside of an actual submarine. There was also quite a bit of visible wear and tear on the items. But more importantly, it struck me as a clever concept that didn’t quite work in practice. Their Heist game builds up to a frantic finale where you have to think fast under pressure to get as much loot as possible, and Wavebreak’s climax is probably intended to create a similar feeling – but in practice, it felt closer to a proofreading exercise, in that you have one attempt and any error means you’ve lost. And the various additional complications that increase the difficulty level felt more like arbitrary gotchas than an interesting challenge.
That said, it also had some interesting and unusual puzzle ideas in it, and it’s good to see a game experimenting with a novel idea even if I wasn’t entirely won over by it in practice. If you’re choosing a game to play at this venue I’d point you at the other two ahead of this one; but if you’ve done those and want more you might find Wavebreak worth a try. 