Played this pop-up escape room at an anime convention. There are very ambitious ideas in this fantasy-themed role-playing room. Everyone picks a card with a role (and gets to put on costumes that have been previously worn by other erm… congoers). Inside the actual experience, there are QR codes on nearly every item. Players must scan the codes with their smartphones (btw smartphones are mandatory not that it’s specified beforehand). Each scan will open a website in a new tab, so get ready to have over 30 tabs open in your phone browser… Some roles have special unique abilities like the wizard’s magic spells and the Druid’s skill in talking to animals. I was a fairy and even the GM didn’t know what my actual powers were so I felt left out. The bookings are always public and we had a full room of 10 strangers. Again, I was the fairy so I didn’t contribute much while everyone else solved the early puzzles without a lot of communication.
I really like the ideas here, but the instructions are very complicated, wasn’t explained by the quiet GM who did not speak over the extremely loud bad karaoke going on in the same room. The QR codes were glitchy and led to us sequence breaking the puzzle flow. Speaking of breaking, several props broke while we were playing including the door. When someone walked under the door, a big magnet with a pointy tack fell on the floor, and thank goodness nobody got hurt. But I didn’t like going through the danger door. Our group literally solved puzzles accidentally because the props broke and revealed items early. And one prop straight up didn’t work so GM just had to manually override. The entire thing was a hot mess, and it didn’t help that we had to communicate with complete strangers in a super loud room, experiencing a novel concept that required every specific role to do their part. It’s a good theme for anime and tabletop gaming events, but I wish the execution were a lot cleaner.