Tara Vaughan

Seriously, how am I the first person to rate this?  It's a phenomenally good game, creative puzzles, gorgeously decorated, the interface has live, 360 and inventory all in one, the hosts are lovely, it's based on a historic radio play, makes a feature out of the place it's located.  You should play it.

Had to use google translate for the payment page.  That was the only less than ideal thing.

It’s actually been about a year and a half since I played this but it’s a remote avatar game I always talk about. I loved that we got to see a bit of Amsterdam - canals and all!  So great to do escape rooms around the world and so much better when the location features in it. 

Worked better for us to fix a time to play and then put together a team.  You have to contact the host to set a time but Mitch was very helpful - and a great host who really gets into character!

Spent a fair bit of time at the beginning sorting out an audio settings issue for one player but Mitch took the time to note how it was resolved in case it comes up again.

I love cut scenes, and I appreciated that we were automatically muted when they ran.  The puzzles were solid but a good story like this makes a game so much more satisfying.

Lots of weirdzo story - so much it was a bit confusing for me, my teammates didn't seem over whelmed, though - and I love lots of story.  Not only were there a whole cast of characters involved (so impressive!) the team was also kind of conscripted to act and... they totally randomly picked the person who knew how to nail a certain role, which was so funny.  They said they have no plans to stop doing the live avatar thing, and it's different from the IRL game they can run in the same space.  Very cool.

Booking was by What'sapp because it was short notice at 2 days out and there was a time diff but by the next morning I had a message that they'd already arranged the actors, so that was efficient, and saved a lot of back and forth.

We weren't over time by much, but they did comment on the fact we were just 4 people, so maybe they usually run it with more?  

Oh, this was primo.  I liked it much better than Avatar Stalker, but it was keen how they kept the video-game type screen where you could see your inventory and your character's health.  The cut scenes and visual effects were EXCELLENT, and there was one painting in the set that I loved so much that I wish I could buy the image of on a piece of swag.

I'm glad I've also done Grand Hotel Immersia, to see the way they used similar elements in really different ways.

I loved the room but had a terrible time.  Two of our players were inexperienced, and the use of telescape and the video components really confused them so one person left the game and the other never managed to figure out that she had to mute her video, and I feel like amid that chaos, the host didn't know what to do besides urge us to just move along with the story rather than stopping to address that.  So, I mean, I'm pretty sure it was a great room but actually I was really stressed and distracted while playing it.  A lot of companies use videos on telescape, and surely it's confusing for a lot of people.  And basically at this point, this company is only running remote games by request, at non-busy times.  So A) if I were them, I wouldn't bother to upgrade it, and B) it took a LOT of effort to finagle a time.  So if you're playing it, make your team really understand they have to mute, and that if they don't the other players can mute the device that's playing the zoom while they watch, so they don't have a wall of stressful echos.  

If you do this one, I recommend also doing the mystery hotel game by Project Avatar.  There are some neat points of comparison, but also you can see that using cut scenes works SO much better than videos on telescape.

For me, the best part of this one was the location.  If you're interested in urban exploration, this is a room you should do.  Also, interesting location because they're continuing to operate despite the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.  If you're looking to book a time, they're only open till 7pm EEST because of a curfew and you can only play Phase 2 (which is remote avatar, by the way, not digital) right now because the basement is a safer location than the main floor.  Vira set up our game by email  - and hosted - and she was great.  

We played with 5 people, and that's what I'd recommend, especially as the base price is for 1-5 players.

just to pass on what would've been helpful for me when I was organizing this:  you have to pay for 5 players minimum, but you can play it with fewer than 5.  Just pop in a fake name or two.  Fair enough that they've got to cover costs.  It's certainly not that expensive to pay for 5, and It's a very good game.  Also, it's on BST.  And you don't HAVE to read the documents or watch the video provided ahead of the game, but it's great to get you in the mood, so why wouldn't you, right?

This is a completely regular game.  Just fine.  Pleasant hosting.  I quite liked the theme.  The online portal gave us about 20 mins of headache but they were quite good about getting us fixed up.  Good amount of games, one particularly neat one, not terribly hard.  Note that the email said all times were in NZST but in fact it was NZDT, so lucky that we caught that in time.