Interstellar

I should say up front that I played this game in Italian, and I speak, at most, _some_ Italian. The game is available in English, but I joined a group that was more comfortable with Italian. The game was mostly language-independent (with text in both English and Italian), and I think I can separate my language difficulties from critique of the game, but it feels important to disclose nevertheless. I liked Interstellar. It was a lot of fun, had good puzzles, well-integrated technology, high quality props, a satisfying ambiance, and impressively creative use of space. After briefing us on the backstory and rules, our GM instructed us to close our eyes and guided us each into specific positions in the room, creating some initial division. We were instructed to keep our eyes closed until the initial audio briefing finished. I thought this was a great approach to starting the game, as it felt like we were dropped into the middle of the action, rather than walking into something. We found this first room of this game to be the most challenging, for a mix of reasons. We were a new team still learning to communicate effectively. We didn’t (I think) entirely understand the pre-game briefing. And, of course, we committed some search failures. On reflection, I don’t think there were any problems with the puzzles themselves, although I felt like they could have used slightly more signposting. The first room also felt the most puzzle-y. The other rooms contained some puzzles, but the rooms tended to lean more on teamwork and coordination than pure puzzling, which I quite enjoyed! While the structure of the game was relatively linear, the reliance on teamwork meant that none of us ever felt bored. There were several _very_ satisfying moments, including some usage of lasers that had me giddy and a location in the room that I would never have guessed we would use. A few logistics notes. The game has a hard minimum of 3 players, but would have been better at 4. Interstellar is also unlisted on Evasion’s main website, as it’s intended for more experienced solvers. However, the Interstellar-specific page is not hard to find with Google, and while I haven’t confirmed this, I suspect they would be happy to welcome anyone who cares enough about escape games to use Morty.