Safarka: Expedition

When I visited Lisbon five years earlier, Safarka provided the clear stand-out room of the trip: at the time a new company with a single game, they were innovative in play style and puzzles. So returning to try their latest was a priority.

Expedition has an unusually well-defined structure. The instructions tell you up front that you’re being assessed, that there will be an actor in the game with you throughout, and that you will have four separate tasks to complete.

As is normal for Safarka, they go the extra mile on immersion and story, with in-character messages before the game begins and a host who is playing their role as soon as you meet them. You then play Expedition as four mini games, each with its own fifteen minute time limit, each with its separate in-character briefing and debrief. There’s no timer running in between the sections, which is why the game is listed as 60-75 minutes long: the intermissions are additional to the sixty minutes of ‘official’ game time, though it’s all integrated as one experience.

The four sections are distinct in setting, decor, and puzzle style. It’s a neat idea done well, and I particularly liked the second part. I got on less well in part three, because it felt like our host was walking us through the puzzles to a substantial degree. That’s a shame, because it was also the section that had the most original, subtle puzzle ideas, and it would have been very satisfying to solve them on our own. However, I suspect it would also have taken rather more than the fifteen minutes available to do so, and we would not have understood the intended story elements. My impression is that the company gives lots of prompting in this part of the game because otherwise players don’t complete it and don’t follow the way the elements in it are supposed to connect to each other; but the result, for me at least, was a dispiriting loss of agency as a player.

There are other quibbles that for me were much more minor: an early puzzle that felt quite arbitrary and another that relied on the initial position of items (of course, with an actor in the room the can intervene if a team moves those items around), coloured lighting in a place where being able to make out colours is important, the rather mechanical nature of the fourth section. On the other hand, it’s a concept game, one where the setup and the actor are a crucial part of the room. It’s trying to do something specific, beyond just give you a themed room of puzzles, and it does so fairly successfully.

Which is to say, I enjoyed some parts of Expedition more than other parts. I think the implementation could do with tweaking in some places, but I like the intention. Safarka are a refreshingly ambitious company who tend to want to create cool, different experiences; even if this one didn’t work for me as well as I’d have liked, they remain the most interesting option I’ve found in Lisbon, especially for enthusiasts looking for something a little more different and original.