La Orden by Experiencity (Madrid)

  • Time: 85 minutes
  • Capacity: 2-7 players
  • Theme: Adventures
  • Difficulty: Medum/Hard
  • Recommendation: Recommendable

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Fecha en la que jugamos: July 2021 (2 players)

Below Zero the game master was…

Os dirigís en helicóptero a una de vuestras rutinarias expediciones al Himalaya cuando éste empieza a fallar…

Your helicopter is heading to a routinary expedition in the Himalaya when something goes wrong…

The beginning is promising, and the general design of the escape room comes along, not disappointing. With a careful atmosphere (not limited to the decoration only), the game introduces “The Yeti” as an addition from the original room in Sabadell (named only “Below Zero”), and offers a more elaborated plot, that is also related with the premise of the rest of the games in La Orden.

In our case, the experience was notably impoverished by our game master. He was polite all the time, but there were a couple of details that left us a bad mouth taste.

The first one was the intro acting. There are game masters able to dive you in the game only with their expressions, gestures and voice alternations. There are others without that skill, that are still good enough to get you in the game if you really want to. And, lastly, there are others whose lack of credibility makes you to stay in the real world during every single second of the interpretation. This last one was our case.

The second game was the game master job itself. In their interventions we realized he was not paying attention to our game, or at least he didn’t know where in the game we were, what we had done already and what not. In the middle of the game a prop activated accidentally at the same time we were doing a task not related with that prop, so we thought we were the ones activating the prop, discarding that task for the rest of the game, what eventually led us to be stuck for a long time, breaking the rhythm and providing frustration. The game master gave us a few minutes more to finish the game. After we asked, he went through the game again with us: then we realized that most of the time he didn’t know what we were doing in the game.  It was so frustrating to know the parts of the game we’ve missed because the game overall was pretty good, and we were surprised that the game master wasn’t able to answer two of our questions (one about a puzzle and another one about the plot), giving us a delayed and doubtful answer.

We highlight that not completing an escape room is frustrating itself, and that can happen with the best game master, since we don’t consider his job is to make sure you complete the game on time, whatsoever. Would we have finished the game with a better game master? WE don’t really know, we consider this a high difficulty escape room, and even if we are experimented players, everyone can have a bad day. But this is not what we claim. We insist: the game master’s job is not make the players finish the game. But it is that they have fun attempting to it.  And, no matter how different are the ways of people for having: being stuck for 20 minutes in the same puzzle is boring for everyone.

This was our experience, in an escape room with a big potential. We’re convinced that with a better game master performance will make futures players to have real fun.