Published on September 12th, 2018 | by Dean Love
1Cluecapers, Winchester – Mission to Winchintzy
As a reviewer of escape games, the “job” as it were, is to describe the experience of playing a game, then try and dig into why your experience was like that. In this, Mission to Winchintzy presents me with something of a problem: I can’t explain why I loved this game so much.
Maybe it’s the way the parallel universe setting creates this idea of a world that’s gone slightly wrong, that leads you to doing weird things in a familiar environment.
Maybe it’s the music that’s piped in constantly that should get annoying but really doesn’t and totally helps set the tone of the game.
Maybe it’s the way that every time we thought “ah we’ve seen this puzzle before” it turned out to be doing something quite different.
Maybe it’s the way it looks like an unassuming escape game from five years ago, and yet as you dig deeper you find yourself interacting with the contents of the game in ways you never before thought of, supported by some really clever technology. A game far more sophisticated than it looks.
Maybe it’s that every puzzle seemed clever and well thought through.
Maybe it’s the potato.
Maybe that it’s just different from anything else we’ve ever played.
Maybe I’m just now realising that I won’t get anywhere near my word-count with this concept review structure.
Maybe it’s that I’m worried describing this game in any sort of detail would ruin it.
Maybe it’s that Winchintzy is just different. It’s chintzy.
Maybe after two days of escape rooms we were just desperate for anything that was off the beaten path.
Maybe we were just in the mood for something quirky.
Maybe it’s that it could so easily have been awful. I mean, when it comes to escape rooms you can build pretty much anything. And people do: space ships, Egyptian tombs, pirate ships. If your starting point is: “let’s build something that’s basically a normal house” then you best do something brilliant with the idea. And honestly: this is probably the first game I’ve seen that has.
Maybe you should just go and play it.
Result – we escaped in 44 minutes
Date played: 25 March 2018
Team: Dean, Katherine, Jess
Summary: Maybe you should just read the entire review.
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