RATING: 4 Keys RESULT: Loss REMAINING: X:XX
As it turns out, anthropologist is just a fancy word for thief!
A temple located deep in the jungles of Malaysia housed a legendary relic. A relic that has been worshiped by its people for thousands of years. Recently, the relic has gone missing and chaos among the people has ensued. Information about the accused thief from the locals have lead to the home of a crazed Anthropologist. You are the team of detectives called in to investigate his study and seek for the stolen relic. There is only one catch… The manic thief has left traps inside the home and you only have one hour to complete your mission before the relic is lost ….forever!
A plucky band of misfit explorers brave a series of death traps all in the name of finding an elusive ancient bounty. Having successfully evaded perils of temple exploration and shaken the locals hot on their trail, it’s finally time to kick back and celebrate their hard earned reward.
Not so fast!
While most action films would find this an appropriate time to roll credits, this is precisely the moment where The Stolen Relic picks up. Most excursions into long lost temples cast the explorers in search of treasure as the heroes merely making good on a finders keepers rule of law. This time around it is revealed that that the plunderers of indigenous heirlooms are in fact the villains that must be stopped at all costs. To that end, it’s up to a new plucky group of treasure-retrievers to break into the anthropologists office and find the stolen relic before it’s too late.
The reverse-plundering takes place largely within the office of the accused thief. The walls are adorned with all manner of artwork, artifacts, and even some entomological specimen. All likely stolen from their rightful owners, no doubt. The centerpiece of the room is a large wooden desk displaying, among other things, a mechanical typewriter and rotary phone.
The office has a timeless feel to it. If it weren’t for the antiquities on the desk it would be hard to discern exactly what decade this excursion is taking place in. It’s easy to get lost in this room. There is a quiet dignity to the space. If it weren’t for the clock ticking down the minutes, a reminder of the urgency of the task at hand, it would be easy to feel a sense of calm in this place and get immersed in all the oddities on display.
It can be hard to make an office bring about excitement, but Themescape really nails the theming here taking such a familiar, and often boring, setting and transporting us to another world, or time, altogether.
The office manages to pack a surprising amount of puzzles into such a modestly sized space. Tasks involved with recovering the relic range from searching for cleverly hidden keys, interacting with a mysterious voice on the telephone, and making sense of the thief’s large collection of artifacts.
An office full of puzzles can easily feel unnatural, puzzles for puzzles sake. And, to be fair, this room could easily be perceived as such. Yet given the nature of it’s inhabitant’s work, likely spending their days solving riddles and evading traps, it was easy for us to imagine someone so lost in their work that it became their only defense mechanism.
While it took longer than we would have liked to discern our first step, once things got going they flowed smoothly and intuitively. The intense variety of puzzles kept us on our toes and actively engaged.
The Stolen Relic puts a fun twist on a tired theme. What if all those good guys in the action films weren’t so good after all? This paradigm shift frames a solid and engaging set of puzzles all set against a believable scenic backdrop that becomes more and more interesting as the story unfolds.
While the scenic quality and varied puzzles added value to the experience, the true star of the show was the pacing. Being thrown into a room that appears to either have a million different puzzles or a million red herrings (or perhaps half a million of each) was intimidating and finding a place to start was daunting. Yet as the story unfolds the pace picks up faster than a boulder chasing down Indiana Jones. What starts as a quiet and methodical heist eventually evolves into a much more frantic and climactic finish as explorers discover there is much more than meets the eye in this unassuming office.
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Venue: Themescape
Location: Broomfield, CO
Number of Games: 3
GAME SPECIFIC INFORMATION:
Duration: 60 minutes
Capacity: 8 people
Group Type: Public / You may be paired with strangers.
Cost: $30 per person