Escape Masters Auckland: Alien Prison Break

One thing I've learned with this and other virtual escape rooms is that the person who is the Avatar is ever more important then before, this one had a definite sense of fun and her setting the scene easily helped with out enjoyment.  You have been kidnapped by Aliens and must escape before they take you to their home planet.  Get ready for a definite Gen1 room but that's not to disparage it as we also had a lot of fun solving the puzzles, even if the alien ship seemed to have been made by Dell!

We only played one game here, but I believe that it's safe to say that the following also applies to Escape Masters' other rooms.  

The first thing to point out is that you don't appear to have a dedicated games master, but you are left with a tablet that acts as your clue system.  Each puzzle inside the room has its' own QR code which you can scan to obtain an automatically generated clue, which is useful as long as your issue matches the pre-written hint.  Unfortunately our issue was a search fail, and so the clue provided of "maybe you need to find more of these things" or something similar was only irritating.  

Once in this position, our only option was to press the bell to request assistance, which involves the games master entering the room to ask us what the issue is.  We explained that we couldn't find the final item, and so the GM then proceeded to prove that they were watching us by searching all of the usual hiding places, before finding the final item for us.  This brings me onto the second issue.  

Escape Masters have a fun system where you can scale the difficulty based on your experience or number of players:  Easy for 2-3 players, Medium for 3-5 players, Hard for 5-8 players, and Master for experienced players or 7-8 players.  We love a challenge, so we chose Master mode without really knowing what that meant.  

We've seen difficulty scaling done really well in UK rooms where puzzles are adjusted, or extra puzzles are not necessary to escape the room successfully but can be completed for a bonus.  Here, easier modes mean that some boxes are left unlocked but the puzzles and clues remain, so one could still solve a puzzle but not have a lock to use the retrieved code on.  In our case, the Master mode meant that we were handcuffed at the beginning and the item we used to free ourselves was also needed later in the game.  However, if played on Easy mode, you'd only need to use the item once.  My advice would be to make sure that you know what has changed in the room due to the difficulty level.  This is all a shame as the puzzles themselves are varied and quite enjoyable and, with a better clue system and GM experience, would be at least 3 stars.