An investigation begins the day after an attempted heist at a museum. Despite being brought in for questioning as suspects, unease led to your attempted escape. Staying too long may lead to your arrest, or perhaps worse!
Rating: Exciting!
Completion Time: 41:24
Date Played: 22nd April 2021
Party Size: 4
Recommended For: Everyone!
*leaderboard klaxons sounding*
In an exciting first, not only did we manage to ace a District 3 room in under 45 minutes with no hints (yay for the bonus achievements!), but at the time of writing this score also earned us the coveted place of 7th in the leaderboard! I normally wouldn’t be this excited but this is the all time leaderboard- yep everyone who has played in person or online! Wow!
I’ll be showing this TikTok to my grandkids some day *blows nose*.
No, but seriously! I was already excited to play Interrogation Room and to get a great score felt like the icing on the cake. After Something Brewing and Haunted were generously comped by the company, we immediately rushed off to book Interrogation as an extra treat for ourselves and weren’t disappointed.
The Story
There’s been a heist at a nearby museum and priceless artefacts have gone missing! In the play at home version of Interrogation, one of your friends was caught at the scene of the crime with a mysterious briefcase the detectives are convinced holds the key to the case. The only problem? Your friend had nothing to do with it! Is he being framed?
Feeling hopeless, he calls you for help. From here, it’s up to you and your team to guide your buddy out of the interrogation room, crack the case wide open, and escape once and for all! Fail and being arrested is the least of his worries!
The Tech
Interrogation Room is what’s known as a “remote avatar” escape room but has the added benefit of Telescape’s online escape room software to hand. What this means is you see and direct an avatar around the physical space asking him to investigate stuff – pick up this, move that, and so on. You also have access to a 360 degree photosphere of the physical space with clickable links that give you a closer look. For this reason it’s best played with 2 screens – or split screen at a pinch.
At times, where we had to input a code in Telescape to unlock a door in the physical room (a cool touch, btw!), it felt a little bit like we were the ‘eyes in the sky’. But largely the game’s joy is in interacting with your live avatar – something District 3 does really, really well!
The Host
Our host this week was Lindsay, one of the founders of District 3 alongside David. Most importantly, he’s also the person behind District 3’s tech, which we enjoyed a lot! But overall, another stand out host experience with hilarious banter, acting, and gentle guidance in the right direction throughout, bringing the game to life.
The Puzzles
Interrogation Room is about ‘medium’ in terms of difficulty, and I’d agree with this rating. Not too easy, but not too hard!
The game starts in- you guessed it– an interrogation room with almost nothing around you for clues. ALMOST nothing! To properly get started, we had to do a bit of searching around and a fair bit of “can you poke that please” or “can you look really closely at this thing“, and hilariously “is that a plug socket on the wall? impossible, they don’t look like- oh wait we’re in Canada.“
However, once you’ve cracked that first room, the whole experience blows right open in an exciting mix of genres: Heist and Historical. I would say that the two genres weren’t always the most comfortable bedfellows, but the concept was unique and they make it work! The game, at times, parkour jumped between puzzles involving CCTV, or UV Light- as you’d expect in a heist game, to deciphering dead languages and researching ancient Gods, as you’d expect for an historical, or museum themed room.
Interrogation Room was both, and neither. It was it’s own thing and heck it really owned it! The finale, in spectacular District 3 style, both themes came together with some very fun special effects. Boom!
In terms of actual puzzles, Interrogation Room is packed with them! Each area begins with an element of ‘search and find’ puzzles – look around and poke a few things! Players can also expect to encounter a few number and letter locks, black light puzzles, logic puzzles, information in different places coming together, translations, ciphers, and so on!
The puzzle I enjoyed the most involved information in one area corresponding to information in another area – again, no spoilers here, but it was a nice spatial awareness puzzle bringing lots of the aspects of the game up until that point, together!
Overall
Overall, another stand-out experience! After playing, I immediately rushed to the Escape Room Discord to share my thoughts and to this date I can’t decide if it’s my favourite of the District 3 online games or not. In any case, I enjoyed playing it a lot. If you’re a fan of drama, excitement, and cool puzzles to boot, you’ll enjoy this!
Interrogation Room (Remote Edition) can be booked for $15-$22 CAD per person via District 3’s website!
[…] and I’m sure you can too! Haha. My closest to 1st place is 7th on an all time leaderboard for District 3 in Canada. Coming 1st place is a right of […]