Wild Hare Escapes – The Comedy of Terrors

Wild Hare Escapes – The Comedy of Terrors
Location: Online
Game Date: 14/12/2020
Team: Amy & Ian
Duration: 75 Minutes

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Theme:
“While getting ready to rehearse your play, one of your castmates uttered the one word you are not supposed to say inside a theatre. You have angered a spirit – the resident ghost of the Lincoln Theatre.

He has locked the doors and windows, and has vowed to bring the building down on your heads… unless you can solve a series of puzzles and escape in 75 minutes.

So it may not be curtains for you after all.”

Wild Hare Escapes are fairly unique, in that Comedy of Terrors was a browser based game, but hosted by a live game host. This meant that your game was monitored at all times, and this enabled to game host to give hints and nudges when asked, and sometimes our host dropped in a nudge when we were close to something.

The game looked good, and at its heart was a point and click adventure, not to dissimilar to the Campfire Legends series of games. The graphics were charming, and clear and captured the feeling of a haunted theatre well, with a few cheeky jumpscares throughout the game.
What Comedy of Terrors did have, in spades was comedy. The small snippets of extra story and world building had a satrical tone, which managed to poke fun at thespians in a loving sort of way (and boy did it make me yern to be back in a theatre!)

The mechanics of the game were simple enough to learn, with all the options to move and look at things being on screen, and an inventory system to use throughout the game.
The layout was somewhat confusing, but there was always a map available to use throughout the game (although we did run round the map like headless chickens at some point)

The game was quite expansive, with lots of different areas to explore and even through it’s point and click nature, it created a fairly immersive environment.

Game Play:
A fairly linear game that had some open elements (a pen and paper is a must in this game). Puzzles were heavily word based, with a good smattering of observation, logic and deduction thrown in.
Puzzles were all wonderfully on theme, keeping fully in tune with the theatre setting. There were plenty of nods to musicals and plays set within the puzzles too (theatre fans will enjoy this!)
The logic in the puzzles was good, once we found our stride and got on the same wavelength as the puzzle designer! It took us a while to get going, but this was down to oversights on our parts and was not wholly the puzzle’s faults.
Signposting could have been slightly clearer in some puzzles. There were a couple of puzzles where we struggled to find the direction we were looking for and some puzzles would have benfitted from more player feedback. (One puzzle we mistakenly took the error noise to be a “correct” noise which caused us a heap of time!) A little bit more in game telegraphing would have made this a lot slicker, however, once we figured out what to (albeit through a nudge from our host, or finally figuring it out) the puzzles became clear and had those lovely Ah-ha moments. Which were found eventually at every step of the game!
Flow was good, with a general smooth feel. There were a few stalls which could be improved with a little extra signposting.
Overall Comedy of Terrors was an enjoyable game, with many charming moments and good humour throughout. Taxing but not overtly tough and the puzzles worked well within the confines of a browser based game.

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via our game host

Game Host:
Kennen was our game host and he was friendly and thorough, going through the rules and mechanics of the game in great detail before starting which left us feeling fully prepared.
He was clearly listening to us intently and was always on hand to give us a clue when requested and to drop us little hints and nudges along the way at the apporiate times.
It never felt like he was encroaching on our game. But just quietly observing and hinting with precision.

Did we “escape”?
Yes ! with a little under 10 minutes to spare!

Website: https://www.wildhareescapes.com
Price:
$25 per person