Cluecapers, Winchester – Rescue From Winchokey
Sometimes you just butt heads with a game. Winchokey was one of those times.
I’m always wary of calling a game ‘too difficult’ as so many things can factor in to this: you could be having a bad day, you could be tired, your brains could just be too different from those of the designer. But this is probably as fair a circumstance as I could find: we were playing Winchokey shortly after, with a break to stretch our legs, playing the other game at this venue: the terrific Winchintzy. We loved that game, so expectations were high for this, but we just couldn’t get into it.
Time and time again we got stumped, not being able to figure out what to do, got a clue, and went “oh yeah, that makes sense”. We didn’t go “oh, we would never have got that”, but we were just consistently failing to get the puzzles. It feels like each puzzle is maybe missing one extra hint to nudge people in the right direction. It was perhaps most obvious in the finale, when immediately upon finding it we got a walkie-talkie buzz and explanation of exactly what we needed to do. It seems like enough teams must struggle at this point that they didn’t even wait to see us flail around (though I guess we were already short on time).
That alone doesn’t make for a bad game, but nothing else really stood out about it. The setting eschewed the bizarre stylings of Winchintzy for a fairly generic prison with just a hint of quirkiness about it. There were some interesting technology interactions but nothing that really blew us away.
So it’s odd one. There’s a certain cleverness to the puzzles in this game. That much was obvious. It was a cleverness that just didn’t work for us. But I can easily imagine other groups finding these puzzles some of the most satisfying escape room puzzles they have ever played. They were hard in a good way, not hard in a “there’s not really enough information for you to figure it out” way.
For us, it wasn’t a great game, but I do feel confident in saying that your perception will vary!
Maybe you should just go and play it.
Result – we escaped in 54 minutes
Date played: 25 March 2018
Team: Dean, Katherine, Jess
Summary: A game with some very clever but very different puzzles. Be warned that they may, like they were for us, be too different for you.
3
Hard
About the Author
Dean Love Dean is a professional writer who has worked for The Mail On Sunday, The Digital Fix, MicroMart and others.
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