Exit The Room – Murder Online

Exit The Room – Murder Online
Location: Online (Physical Room in Vienna and Manchester)
Game Date: 04/10/2020
Team: Amy & Ian, Gord and Liz
Duration: 60 minutes

We were contacted by exit the room to review one of their online avatar games, unfortunately due to a possible mix up in translation, we ended up being booked on Murder which is a game Ian and I had played previously in Manchester. We had originally penned the Voodoo game for our online adventure, and didn’t realise we were booked into Murder until we started playing! But would it differ from the version we played in Manchester?

Theme:
“This town is not known to be a tourist destination and its motel is shady at best. Among the locals it is knwon for awful secrets that noone wants to speak about. Lots of people have entered but never left this motel and the local police officers have given up. You will need to step into Room 9, where everything seems to happen, and find all its dark secrets in order to solve the case”

The set was simply decorated, with a bed, and all the accoutrements you’d expect to find in a shady motel. There was nothing that could be construed as red-herrings or distractions from the game. As we moved further into the game, the set because darker in tone, but nothing too scary. Lighting was good throughout. The set was finished to a good standard.

Game Play:
A fairly linear game with a couple of open moments, with a focus on logic, math and observation puzzles with a small amount of searching thrown in. We were informed a couple of times that the game has been changed slightly to be more accessible to the online players. There were a few things in the game that we looked at but were told “That’s for the real life version of the game”
The puzzles were fairly logical, and quite standard escape room flair. The game progressed nicely from the discovery of the murder to the seriel killers motives and secret lair. The game used the puzzles fairly nicely in theme, but not wholelly “coming from” the space itself. Some of the puzzles felt distincly layerd onto the game.
The flow was OK, as with playing online the flow is never going to be AS good as you’d find in person, but the game kept moving without any real sticking points.
Signposting was kept at a minimum, but where it was used it was used well and fairly.

(As an interesting aside, and from a purely personal POV, when Ian and I played this room in Manchester we had one HELL of an argument over several of the puzzles in this room, most vivid was the final puzzle… and upon replaying (essentially) this room, I cannot understand or fathom what the HELL I was doing wrong with that puzzle the first time we played! Seems my puzzle solving may have got better!!)

Clue System:
Clues would have been delivered via our game host, but we didn’t use any

Game Host:
Our game host was charming, funny and followed our directions very well, I have to hand it to him he was following our directions and playing the game with us in his second language, which is an excellent skill to have, and his English was exceptional!
He gave us good camera work and coped with any blips well.

Connection:
The connection for the most part was stable, we did lose camera feed for about 5 minutes in the middle of the game, but our host dealt with it swiftly and professionally, it didn’t impede on our gameplay too much!

Did we escape?
Yes in about 50 minutes (which included the time spent waiting to fix the tech issue)

Website: https://www.exittheroom.com/online-escape-rooms
Price:
£99 per game (basic)
£119 per game (premium)

On the side of premium vs basic, we played 2 other Exit the Room games with Gordon and Liz, and can honestly say that the basic didn’t detract from our game in any way, usually one of us (Liz) has a notepad and is jotting away and popping the codes in to get our visuals is always a nice interactive touch. The personlised skin.. I can take it or leave it!