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marmotry

    Paul L

    @CurtJ@VintageGooseChase

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    Cabin 2.0

    Cabin 2.0

    Break Free Escape Games

    • Escape room
    • IRL
    We recently played this escape room and had a mixed experience. On the positive side, the set design was excellent - the atmosphere was immersive and the space was decorated with a lot of attention to detail. You could tell the owner/designer loved the genre and knew how to create the spooky tone. Many of the puzzles were genuinely satisfying, with clear cues and mechanics that made for rewarding solves. However, several puzzles - including the very first one - weren't clued clearly enough for us to fairly solve. We were able to understand what elements were involved and the overall mechanic was familiar, but the order in which those elements needed to be used wasn't intuitive. The clues themselves were also somewhat ambiguous. This led to a lot of trial and error as we resorted to trying to brute-force the puzzle, as the logical solutions weren't working. That first puzzle in particular created a frustrating bottleneck early on, where we were stuck for nearly 10 minutes without apparent access to an on-demand hint system. This lack of guidance made the experience feel more confusing than challenging, and unfortunately set a discouraging tone for the rest of the game. The fact that the hint system was by-request only (and presented on the in-room UI as limited to 3 hints/game) made us reluctant to use those hints. As such, we were left flailing at a few key points where a simple protactive GM nudge could have kept things moving. While the dim lighting and flickering effects added to the ambiance, they sometimes made it harder to actually engage with the puzzles. Personally, I don't find darkness to be a compelling challenge in an escape room; it felt more like an obstacle than a feature. That said, the room clearly has potential. With a few adjustments to puzzle clue-ing and a more attentive GM approach, this could be a much stronger experience.