W.a hat that would make a traveler off? Someone arriving from 2019 would be anxious to find the most relaxed night out this year with six people logging into their computers from their living rooms to play an intense game of puzzle solving. played.
And no one would come from 2001 recognizing the words to describe the experience: Zoom, YouTube, QR codes, Instagram, Wikipedia, Google Maps… none of that would be terminology.
In that sense, The Kindling Hour is right now. It’s an escape room style game that uses online tools to compensate for social distance requests. Throw in a suggestion about whistleblowing, physical abuse and anti – corruption investigations, and you could hardly be more 2021.
Created by Ollie Jones and Clem Garrity of Swamp Motel, this is the third in a trilogy started by Plymouth Point, in which your team goes in search of missing women, and continues on with The Mermaid’s Tongue, in which you have to stop an old device from falling into the wrong hands.
This time, we have to use ciphers, passwords and flashpoints within clues to track down the accessible Ivy Isklander before the reckless London Coalition can get to it. If nothing else, our time traveler would have identified a plot with Arthurian myth and Trojan myth coupled with a Hitchcockian sense that the thrush of the chase is more important than whatever we plan to run.
Like Tongue of the Mermaid, if my youngest companions hadn’t found the solutions before I even recognized the issues, I think I would still be playing now. What is undoubtedly the technical performance of Swamp Motel; in a time of glitchy wifi and unobtrusive mute buttons, the display is unobtrusive, all the more so with its high-definition movie sequences suggesting the big-screen obstacle it wants to be.
Like blockbuster, it’s about how intense it is right now. Like similar online events, we don’t worry too much about the characters or engage in any deeper thought than the attempt to solve the next puzzle. It’s very enjoyable, but wouldn’t our time traveler like to see those same approaches to something more sustainable?