To bury Ramses and survive in the Fallout asylum – how the Cybersport.ru team passed quests in reality

Let’s start with the basics

A few words about the very phenomenon of quests in reality. This is the name of an atmospheric adventure in which players must get out of confined spaces using available tools and solving riddles. The phenomenon emerged in the early 2010s in Asia, when adventurous people came up with the idea to bring to life the escape the room genre, popular at the time in the format of video games. According to tradition, the passage of the “room” is given from 45 minutes to one and a half hours, and the main goal is always the same – to find a way out.

Over time, the quests in reality began to be modified and moved from simple riddles to full-fledged stories, sometimes with the participation of actors. The riddles themselves also became much more complicated and interesting: if at first it was about puzzles, which had to be solved mainly with paper and a pen, then their modern versions are full of entourage solutions, magnets and other technical tricks are used with might and main to create a full-fledged experience without convention. Well, or almost without convention. One of the companies that provide the opportunity to go through such quests is “Claustrophobia”, which was our choice.

Egyptian force

The first adventure of the day was The Curse of Ramses. The choice fell for several reasons: on the site it is declared as the most difficult of the entire line, there is no interaction with the actors (some of our team had not the most pleasant experience associated with horror quests – it was not without bruises and bruises), and in the process you can joke about Roman RAMZES666 Kushnareva…

An attempt to stylize it like Egypt turned out to be more successful than not. I had several escape rooms behind me, which I went through three or four years ago, and at that moment I was, to put it mildly, disappointed: I remember exactly how the “escape from a specially guarded prison” turned into kneeling climbing in a shabby basement with searching for objects in a room so crowded with them that it simply cannot be conveyed in words. Is it worth mentioning that I opened the final combination lock without looking for clues, simply because it had overwritten buttons? By the way, the moderators did not appreciate such brute force – the “voice from above” immediately asked to close the door and open “normally”.

In this regard, “Ramses” looks much more advantageous: the shabby (stylized!) Walls are dotted with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the riddles are mostly thematic and, what is even more important, are quite varied. One of the first, for example, makes it possible to recall a school mathematics course by solving a system of equations with several unknowns in the mind: the order of the numbers is low enough for both negligent schoolchildren and adults who have forgotten mathematics to cope.

Alas, not all of the riddles can boast of a logical solution and respect for the atmosphere. So, one of the most difficult tasks was the “analysis” of the star map, for some reason with alchemical symbols on it. It would seem, how are Ancient Egypt and alchemy, which originated somewhere in a thousand years after the reign of Ramses II, are connected? But this, of course, is nit-picking.

Another “optical” riddle left in itself a feeling of deception: until recently, no one wanted to believe that the solution found was the right one. The answer turned out to be too simple (which, by the way, was indicated by the worn-out keys – about the same problem as in the “specially guarded prison”).

The passage in the end boiled down to the fact that we easily flew through the introduction, got stuck on non-obvious riddles for most of the time (in the end, we even had to use hints) and as a result ended the final rooms in full steam again. I would like to believe that the problem, as they say, is not in us, but in, to put it mildly, strange clues and a certain lack of logic of what is happening. It is still possible to believe in local Egypt, however, with a certain amount of imagination, and the attempt to get out, as stated in the prehistory, really resembles an adventure film with your participation.

The most difficult quest was behind, ahead – a purely playable adventure in the spirit of Fallout, in which, moreover, you can and should use force – sounded promising!

Nuclear titbit

When we entered the premises of the new quest, Machinae immediately indicated his main desire for this adventure: “I want to knock the door off my feet.” Looking ahead, I will say that he almost succeeded.

Vault 13 is a quest based on the Fallout universe. If in “Ramses” we solved the riddles of the insidious pharaoh and tried to leave his tomb after we were flooded in it, then “Shelter” told the story of how a group of survivors was trapped in their own shelter, where, due to a mistake, oxygen began to run out rapidly. The only way out is guarded by a police automaton, who strictly follows the program and does not intend to release anyone.

Upon request, our second adventure was supposed to offer “unexpected methods of passage”, but in fact it turned out to be much more logical and simpler than the same “Ramses”. References to the universe like the same Nuka-Cola and power armor in the closet were indeed in place, but the rest of the entourage turned out to be much more scarce. The shabby walls painted with Soviet green paint do not fit well with the American post-apocalyptic sanctuary, and many other solutions, such as using car seats as sofas, look extremely inappropriate. At the same time, there is a big plus: local riddles almost did not raise questions and were solved in general quite logically, not counting one specific one (we will not say which one, in order to avoid spoilers).

Most of the solutions, however, literally lie on the surface, and about any “unexpected” methods of passing the speech does not even come close, everything is completely linear. It is quite funny that one of the seemingly key mysteries can be solved at all by a crude “button-mesh”, which, to be honest, seems strange to me.

Oh yeah, Machinae ended up knocking out the door. True, not with his foot, as he wanted, but with a heavy cart. The main thing is that in the end he was very pleased – both with himself, and with the roar made, and with the sight of the knocked down door.

Instead of an afterword

The text will most likely give the impression that I was not enthusiastic about both adventures, and this will be … a pretty accurate description of my feelings. The most pleasant moment for me was not so much solving riddles (simple or illogical), as communicating in an informal setting and in person: with the current restrictions, we continue to work remotely most of the time, and there is still not enough live communication.

As for the live quests … For me, their big problem is that most of the time they are too far-fetched. No, of course, they are still far from the level of the legendary “duck” from The Longest Journey, but for me, a lover of quests as a genre, what am I repeatedly confessed, it is simply boring to look at the secondary solutions implemented live. For those who made their own cookies in Still Life, got to the lighthouse in Myst and opened the refrigerator in Pilot Brothers, no Vault 13 is scary, sorry. Colleagues, however, were quite pleased – especially Machinae, who carried out his destructive plan.