Webscapade: Welcome to Argenia | Review
You receive a strange letter from your Uncle Rory asking for your help. But what starts out as a simple task for a quick payday suddenly turns into a mission filled with danger and intrigue. Can you foil the plot and save the day before it’s too late? Will you be the hero that Argenia longs for? Can this be yet another rhetorical question?
Rating: Immersive!
Completion Time: 01:13:41
Date Played: 17th July 2021
Party Size: 4
Recommended For: Experienced teams who want a realistic immersive adventure
It all started with an email that probably should have gone into my spam folder- I’m kidding! Unless…
“I’m your Uncle Rory, son of your grandma’s cousin… I met an Argenian prince-“
If it weren’t part of a digital escape room experience, I definitely wouldn’t have believed it. But there we were, all logged in to play Welcome to Argenia, and our team of 4 players were super excited to receive such an email. Argenian princes… Scandal in a far off land… A long lost uncle? Exciting!
The Country of Argenia
Welcome to Argenia is Webscapade’s first play at home adventure in what looks to be a very interesting series. It is set in the fictional country of Argenia- and yes, about halfway through we were so convinced by the game we had to question whether Argenia was in fact a real place. But Argenia is not a particularly happy place – there’s a storm brewing. With Argenian Independence Day just around the corner the masses are mobilising for another revolution, this time against the royal family!
As an International Relations (w/ a Major in Law) graduate, I’m not sure how I feel about trying to put down a revolution, but since my uncle is in danger we can put morals to one side and hop to the rescue.
The first port of call is finding the prince.
An Alternate Reality adventure through the web
What follows is a fun game of cat-and-mouse through the internet as Webscapade have set up a digital trail of breadcrumbs for players to follow that’ll take them onto Facebook, into the admin of hotel websites, and into some very shady parts of the Argenian dark web.
Personally I love this style of alternate reality game. It’s always fun to see fact and fiction blend into one as you scour Google wondering what is real and what isn’t. Webscapade do this really well and, with a feature I appreciated a lot, they even let you know which browser tabs you can close at the end of each puzzle. As a chronic 50-tabs-open person, I appreciate this in a puzzle game!
37 Incorrect Guesses!
In terms of game difficulty, I’d rate this on the hard side. As a team of 4 we used a couple of clues and made 37 incorrect guesses (oops!). Clues and wrong guesses were fairly exclusively concentrated on one puzzle in the game however, and even then largely due to us going off on an incorrect tangent and using something we wouldn’t need until later in the game.
It’s very possible that the reason I felt this on the hard side though is because each puzzle was quite unique. Genuinely! We encountered a lot of puzzles I’d never seen before in a play at home escape room game. Some excellent logical deduction, some searching and finding, and some very curious grid shifting puzzles which will probably haunt my nightmares for a few more weeks.
But that said, even the puzzles we did ‘breeze’ through felt like a good challenge. I think if I’d played this alone I’d have given up early – so a word of warning this game is definitely best played in a team! Not just that more heads are better than one, but Welcome to Argenia is just quite a fun game you’d want to share with friends!
The Verdict
For a brand new company launching a game quite late into lockdown (as many countries are starting to reopen) is a bold move, but Webscapade have pulled it off with an incredibly immersive and genuinely exciting alternate reality! Needless to say, they’ve nailed it and Welcome to Argenia is a brilliant game packed with intrigue. It definitely goes into my category of ‘hidden gems’ and if you’re looking for an immersive 1-2 hour long experience to play any time with friends, you’ll not be disappointed with this!
Welcome to Argenia can be booked for $25 per team over on Webscapade’s website here.
