Hull, Mar 2022
One of many life lessons I’ve learned from escape rooms is, if you’re awaking from stasis on a spacecraft, you can be pretty sure you’re in mortal peril. Impact’s flavour of peril is the exploding ship sort rather than the marauding alien type, but you’ll need to do some rapid fixing up to make it out.
Our briefing included assignment of different crew roles to each player. It might have been nice if those roles had been directly used within the game a little more, but it was still a great way to get players into the story. That was helped by a small lighting effect in the initial area, one of many nice touches throughout the game that contributed to an impressive and convincing spaceship environment that combined space decor with industrial.
Impact has a style of play that blends tech-based screens with some much more physical tasks, with no padlocks in sight. Near the start the quantity of information available to look at was almost overwhelming, but good signposting meant that once we got started there was a clear flow from one task to another.
Although there are no physical padlocks, some of the puzzles seemed padlock-style, in that they involved fairly arbitrary digital manipulation to extract a code number. The game was at its best with the more physical tasks that involved patching together the damaged spaceship. Better still was the clever design of the physical space, which made for a very active game in a way that fitted the theme perfectly.
Enigma describe Impact as the hardest game at their Hull venue, and that seems fair: although we actually completed it slightly faster than their Chocolate Factory room, with Impact it felt like we were speeding through one puzzle after another at a rapid pace, and it still took over 45 mins to finish. It felt pacey and original, in layout and design, keeping the adrenaline level up throughout to a fun finish; if you’re anywhere near Hull, you should make a point of playing this one. 
