Montreal, May 2025
This game is a sequel to Immersia’s Weekend at the Shack game, at their other branch; we hadn’t played that one but we cheerfully plunged into the sequel anyhow. At time of writing it’s also the company’s newest room, and was considerably larger in scale and game area than the others we played with them.
The premise is that, a decade after surviving an attack from a serial killer (the original game), one of your fellow survivors has found where the killer is imprisoned and wants you to help him take revenge. Which honestly sounds like a dreadful plan, but there you go.
Immersia have a flair for starting off their games with a little drama, in a rather more immersive way than just leading you into a room and telling you that you have sixty minutes. That’s doubly true here, and of course this game is longer than sixty minutes anyhow.
In fact, it gave the impression of being longer than it was, sprawling through a whole sequence of areas and from one scene to another, driven by a story that revels in throwing new twists at you, and by the time we completed it the opening sections were a distant memory. That naturally involved plenty of puzzles, including some notably clever and/or pleasing ones. One early puzzle was a clever way to ensure that the players understand the backstory in sufficient detail for the later stages of the game to make sense; it worked very well for that purpose, though as a puzzle it was a bit of a bottleneck that outstayed its welcome. Elsewhere the story is mostly advanced through use of video, though often used in a more dynamic and immersive way than simply using it like a cutscene.
For such a narrative-driven game, I felt that the story didn’t entirely come together in a satisfying way for me; and perhaps for that reason, the game content felt more like a series of different pieces than a cohesive whole. Even so, those pieces had a lot to enjoy and be impressed by. There’s a contrast between this and Project Delta at the same venue, where the latter is tightly and efficiently focused around a specific concept; this one is not. It’s a bumper-size game, and if you subscribe to the theory that more is more, you should have a great time in it. 
