Ctrl Alt Esc – Spacescape

Ctrl Alt Esc – Spacescape
Location: Margate
Game Date: 22/08/2018
Team: Amy & Ian

Theme:
“You and your crew are on a voyage to a newly discovered planet, but now the spaceship’s lights are flashing and alarms are sounding.
Surely you can just turn off the warnings and forget about it, or maybe you need to prepare the escape pod…”

Theming was great, a cool looking, clinical space befitting of a spaceship with a good level of immersion, the addition of the pilot “Mac” was a nice touch to make the space beliveable. There was nothing out of place or that could be misconstrued as a red herring. The use of tech was nice, and fitting for a space ship!
The space was large, and kept on going which gave a very physical element to the room with lots of crawling, ducking and climbing!
The light level was good, providing you kept on top of things, having to keep the spaceship in an inhabitable condition makes for a tense state of play at time!
The mechanics of the end of the game are absoloutly super and really made the room quite “extra” – it was very fitting for the theme and story!

Game Play:
An open game, that had a good mix of puzzles. Logic, word, codebreaking, teamwork, observation & physical
The puzzles were logical, fun and had nice ah-ha moments… even though we spent a lot of time running round like headless chickens not knowing what to do (why does this seem to happen in “tech rooms”) – maybe the lack of instant feed back on correct answers to puzzles isn’t a clear as “opening a padlock” and this disrupts our personal flow a bit.
However, flow was good, yet hectic – puzzles were solved in spurts, interspersed with moments of headless chickeness… but things soon came together. Signposting was very subtle, with a lot of connections being left to the player to find and complete, this does give an excellent sense of acheivement and makes the game very ambitious. There was one super super puzzle that we worked our way up to throughout the duration of the game, so when it came together the ah-ha moment was exciting and rewarding.
Pulses were also set racing due to the ever pressing need of keeping the crew, and the ship in good condition, quite often stopping us in our tracks to repair each other and the ship! This added a sense of realism and urgency to the game, and on reflection it added a lot, it was another layer that upped the immersion.
An enjoyable, challenging game that would be an absoloute romp with more players (If you’re brave, take 2 and be prepared to work your socks off and come out a bit on the hot side!) I would reccomend enjoying Spacescape in a group of 4!

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via Mac, the pilot, and through a screen

Game Host:
Our game host was the owner and he was very friendly and ran our game well, delivering us numerous clues when we were being chickens.

Did we escape?
Yes, in 1hr 11minutes

Website: https://ctrlaltesc.co.uk
Price:
2 Players £50
3 Players £65
4 Players £80
5 Players £90
6 Players £100
7 Players £110
8 Players £120

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