Games are harder than I remember
– Everything is an Adventure: Column by Julia Wolf –
Games, board or otherwise, have never been a favorite pastime of mine. Most of my experience with games, thus far, has been while babysitting. Candy Land and Go Fish are about the extent of my knowledge. So, when I actually do play a game aimed at teenagers, I always seem to end up surprised at how challenging they are.
My “little sister” through Big Brothers Big Sisters and I recently decided to take on a virtual escape room, to get us through some of the rainy fall weather. My poor, old computer didn’t think it was a great idea, but we are making it work on my phone.
We ended up finding a random escape room from a library in Kentucky. It is great, because it is free, and we will likely get close to four hours of entertainment out of it by the time we solve it. That is about four times as long as I originally thought it was going to take us, because it is far more elaborate than I anticipated it being.
The virtual escape room is actually a murder mystery and appears to have been uploaded close to Halloween a few years ago. So far, we ran into a sudoku puzzle I had to write out and solve the whole thing, in order to find certain numbers, a word unscramble that was quite difficult, a quick word search and a letter/number challenge that we have not figured out yet.
My little didn’t seem particularly interested in the sudoku, so I offered to do it in between our hang out times. It took an hour for me to get it. I was just glad I had it solved correctly and could open the next step.
The word unscramble was incredibly difficult. I solved the first three words right away, my little got one farther in the puzzle, then we were stumped.
Extra effort on my part solved three more of them, then I cheated and put the last two words through a word unscrambler online. One, all I could see was “dishthing” and I assumed that was not it. It was “hindsight.” That made way more sense, but the whole puzzle was honestly just random, spooky sounding words.
Thankfully, that puzzle also worked out at the end.
The letter/number thing was just plain hard. I tried it two different ways, and my co-worker tried her hand at solving it. Nothing. At least we could both feel stupid together.
My next guess is that it is using the Greek alphabet, instead of the English alphabet. I’m not sure it is worth it, though, and it seems odd that we would have to download another language keyboard, in order to solve a puzzle.
Hopefully, whatever is hidden behind that puzzle isn’t vital to solving the mystery, because I’m not sure we will ever be able to solve it. Oh well.
The escape room has been a lot of fun, though. If you have bored teenagers in your house, I strongly recommend you find a free one online to do. While I still can’t say I love games, people who say they love games tend to go all in, I would do an escape room again.
Also, I am very curious who is the murderer.
