Japan Escape Games

Escape the room games like the one featured on the top of this post have been a thing for a good while.  Most of them are made in flash and they are the kind of games that I can never be bothered to spend much time with because I'd rather be playing something....not flash.

Anyway thanks to my wife and her friends I was introduced to some REAL escape type games being hosted around Japan by a company called Scrap (http://realdgame.jp/). 

The idea is simple, there is some kind of plot laid out before all the attendees at the start of the event, then people must solve a number of puzzles and reach the end within a set time limit.  The one we went to was being hosted at a place called Monkey Park near Nagoya

The thing was laid out over the whole park and the first puzzle presented was a cryptic display of where all the other puzzles were.  There were 4 big puzzles in all which had a number of smaller puzzles inside them that you had to figure out in order to get the answer to progress to the next section.  We were also given a 70 minute time limit to get everything done so if you can't do it in that time then tough shit, game over.

The first few puzzles were laughably easy but by the time you reach stage 3 things start to get complicated and me and my group were stumped.  We weren't the only ones though as the vast majority of people attending the event had to take the walk of shame back to their seats at the start when the timer was done.  The winners were paraded out and applauded but you would be surprised at just how few people it was in comparison to the number of attendees.

The problem isn't so much the puzzles themselves, given enough time to think over them I think anyone could work them out but park navigation and time limit make things extremely difficult.  Also a lot of the puzzles require a pretty decent knowledge of Japanese, so if you're a visiting tourist looking for a fun day out then maybe this isn't quite for you.   It's also a little expensive (around 4000 yen for a ticket) but if you can get a decent group of friends together for it then it's a really enjoyable way to spend an evening.

At the end of the event I was given a pamphlet for all upcoming escape games hosted by the same company.  Right slap in the middle of the thing was an advert for a Biohazard (Resident Evil) themed escape game going down at some point in Osaka's Universal Studios theme park.  I absolutely plan to attend that and I'll try and take some non-spoilerific pictures when I do.