Review: Countdown Live Escape Games

RATING: 3 Keys RESULT: Loss REMAINING: X:XX

It’s about time we get punished for being so beautiful.

Story

Meredith has captured her next group of victims, and you are one of them! Experience the world of terror like never before. “Atelophobia” is based off the film from horror director Joe Lujan. You only have 60 minutes to escape. Do you dare to play?

That is the most vague of all stories, for sure, but as soon as you enter the room you are treated to a video that sets up the experience nicely. Atelophobia is the fear of imperfection, which in this experience translates as wanting to have perfect beauty.

The room makes more sense if you read the synopsis of the film: Meredith is a girl who so desperately tries to fit in with the beautiful people. A group of beauty pageant girls that have been friends since they were kids. When her attempts fail, and the bullying laps over into adulthood from these girls, Meredith snaps and begins a terrifying life or death game with the girls who treated her so horribly. They must either kill themselves, or live their lives with some sort of “imperfection.”

This drives a serial killer to gather up all the popular and attractive people from her school up and kill them (of disfigure them at least) for being so mean to her. We’d like to think we were pretty and popular enough that we only just missed the cut to be captured. That isn’t in the story, that was just how we liked to play it.

Scenic

There were two things in this room that you notice right away and both are unsettling. The first is a circular door at one end, that you had previously been warned that some of the group would have to enter one at a time, at random, but since there were only two of us, that meant neither one was going to escape that daunting fate.

On the other side of the room was a large throne where the serial killer sat, dressed in a dark gown with a black veil covering her face. You can tell it’s a mannequin, but neither one of us wanted to get too close either way. We’re not too proud to admit that we spent the entire game huddled in the center of the room unless absolutely necessary. As things progress, not only do you have to search the creepy mannequin, but you also have to make your journey into the mind of the killer, AKA, the aforementioned circular doorway.

Since the venue is sadly closed, and you won’t get a chance to experience it for yourself, we’ll do my best to let you know what you missed. The door opens to reveal a tube just big enough for one person to stand in, then you slide the door around, which opens up a passage in front of you. The dark room is only lit by strobe lights which is disorienting enough, but then you have to make your way around the corner to discover a grisly shrine and a gruesome past victim. As if that wasn’t unsettling enough, the end of the game requires you to dig around in the body to find body parts with the necessary information on how to escape.

Puzzles

The puzzles were the weakest link in this room as they were relatively simple and nothing original was found. In the heat of the moment, it was hard for us to concentrate because we were so on edge, ready for a scare to come out at any moment that we missed a lot of things that should have been obvious. Truthfully, if the challenges in the room were any harder, we might have had no chance of getting as close to escaping as we did because it was hard enough to concentrate through the fog of fear.

While the mechanics of the puzzle were nothing special, we can at least appreciate that everything was on theme and served the story well. As the game progresses, you learn more about the killer, and about the potential victims that you are there to save, so it did a nice job at filling out the story as you went along.

Overall

Every ten minutes the timer on the TV would reveal a little bit more of the story through some pretty decent actors begging us for help, then a timely bang on the door put us right back on edge. The staff knew exactly what little things were needed to provide perfect jump scares. By far their greatest came when it was revealed that this room had an actor.

While investigating the mannequin, our backs were turned to the tube door, and we didn’t know at the time that it led to another room, so we never saw someone come into ours. We heard a noise, and like we were in our own horror movie, we slowly turned to see the actual creepy killer herself in the room, who screamed at us, then disappeared into the darkness of the tube. This made our journey into her mind even more terrifying because we knew she had to be in there, and sure enough, with some clever hiding places, she jumped out to scare us every single time. It truly did feel like being in a haunted house for an hour.

The worst news about this venue closing was that there were plans of making a sequel to this room, as it was based on a local indie horror movie so there was plenty more story to tell. Sadly, we’ll never get to see the sequel, but we can imagine it would have been just as scary, and hopefully with more engaging puzzles.