RATING: 4 Keys           RESULT: Win           REMAINING: 20:04

What better place to start than the beginning, even if it’s inside a tomb!

A crystal relic permitting time travel has been discovered but its energy is fading. The artifact’s power source is housed within the Great Sphinx of Egypt. Your mission is to travel undercover to Egypt, investigate the hidden chambers of the Sphinx in search of this ancient power and charge the relic before your cover is blown.

Origins is the first stepping stone in a series of games at Get Out! that tell one cohesive story. As part of a secret organization called the Temporal Displacement Bureau, or TDB for short, you are tasked with retrieving and recharging the Sparks: colored crystals with powerful abilities. Throughout your journey, a shadowy society called LIGHT attempts to stand in your way in the hopes of stealing the Sparks for themselves for their own nefarious purposes.

As your first mission, Origins introduces you to the world of the TDB, showcasing the Bureau’s secrecy as you go undercover to navigate hidden passages and recharge the Aeon Spark at its source — Giza’s Great Sphinx. Although LIGHT never makes an appearance in their premier game, it remains to be seen how the organization’s presence will impact the story in the future and offers a compelling reason to come back and see what twists and turns await.

It was a bold choice to start things off quite humbly in an office-like space which serves as the tour group waiting room. A few Egyptian artifacts and exhibits line the walls, while a large soda vending machine hums in the corner.

From there, however, we make our way into some sort of hidden storage facility stacked to the ceiling with boxes. The walls and floor here are much more themed to the sphinx, though the sudden change of scenery was somewhat jarring for a few members of our team. This left us with a few questions about where we had been before (Were we always in the sphinx, albeit a heavily renovated room?) and how we got from point A to point B (was the door we stepped through some sort of portal?)

As we entered the foot of the sphinx where the Aeon Spark’s charger was located, I was overwhelmed by how large the room seemed compared to its predecessors – although a good portion of it felt somewhat unused. In truth this very rectangular final chamber felt somewhat plain for a hidden chamber of vast importance within the Great Sphinx.

Origins’ shining aspect are its puzzles: a wonderful mixture of physical and mental tasks that flow smoothly and feel in-touch with the story Get Out! aims to tell, even incorporating a decent amount of tech that feels appropriate to the setting.

More than once throughout our journey we found items in our backpack – given to us before we entered the room – that made perfect sense for a tourist to carry, but seemed like they would have no real value in the world of stones and spies we found ourselves in. We were wrong.

The gameplay truly feels like it blossoms as the story progresses, partly due to its organic sense of flow. Things begin with a linear set of tasks to accomplish before branching out to provide everyone in the group with something to do before coming together to complete the game’s most important task: recharing the Aeon Stone.

Get Out! has made an interesting decision by deciding to completely tie all of their rooms together into separate chapters of the same story. Because of this, escaping with our recharged Aeon Spark felt like a true accomplishment, sure to garner us praise from our superiors at the TDB (hopefully they’ll reward us with a promotion before our next mission!)

Origins serves as a great beginning to a story we’re sure will have plenty of twists and turns. The game’s seamlessly flowing puzzles show that its creators are certainly fans of the escape room genre, even if some of the game’s scenic direction left us a little confused at times.

We’re certainly excited to have a new highly story-centric venue in the Orlando market. We look forward to our next assignment to see what locale the TDB takes us to next!

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Venue: Get Out!

Location: Orlando, Florida

Number of Games: 2

GAME SPECIFIC INFORMATION:

Duration: 60 minutes

Capacity: 8 people

Group Type: Public / You may be paired with strangers.

Cost: This venue has permanently closed.

We thank Get Out! for inviting us to play this game. Although complimentary admission was generously provided, that in no way impacts the opinion included within this review.