A month long event that was held last month by Escape Room is the first of it’s kind in Malaysia, to celebrate the spooky halloween month: Halloween Escape @ Wet World Shah Alam. Escman League’s trio (Dory Croft, Rosie Ring & Scooby Holmes) ventured to this spooky event on a rainy Sunday.
(Scooby Holmes: Why~? Why?! I don’t want go.. can ar?)
What was it all about?
Upon entering the wet theme park-turned spooky event, we’re being greeted by some very enthusiastic chap who lead us to take pictures with their event backdrop. I like their spirit of welcoming visitors, but knowing it’s just some tourist trap for buying expensive photos, we just went our way to the main event.
On first glance, it doesn’t feel spooky.. on more glances, it doesn’t feel spooky at all.. The props are not overly well done, it looks like some high school art project, and maybe it’s due to the wide space of the area, the atmosphere doesn’t not have any eerie feeling, except for the park when we come out from the haunted house.. However, i do want to give a thumbs up to the cosplayers acting out as different halloween characters, from zombie nurse, zombie prisoner, zombie soldier, chinese ghost, to grim reapers… their make up is very well done, and although it was raining half the time i was there, they stayed in character the whole time.. even though they’re already soaking wet.. kudos to those hardworking people…
There are timed events where it’ll show some projected video and some voices acting out saying something along the line of needing us to escape in time before we’re doomed forever.. There’s 8-10 of these, played at each hour or so… and each is different, so I have to praise the organizers for putting effort on this.. However, the sound is kinda muffled, so I didn’t really grasp what was spoken.. and since it made no difference to the games, so it’s ignorable..but it does add a bit into the spooky ambience.
The games is separated into 2 sections:
1. 4 mini escape games
We’re given 10 minutes to solve 2 puzzles and each have their own theme:
a. Graveyard
b. The Ring
c. Vampire (something)
d. Slaughter House
The organizer make use of existing huts of the theme park and turned it into small rooms for the escape game, each theme has 2 huts, to ease the queue time needed. There’s a maximum of 4-5 person per group.
In case of failure to escape in time, we need to re-queue and can re-challenge it again.
When we win, we’re given vouchers to escape room games.
2. A haunted house + 2 layer escape game
In which we had to pass through a haunted house section.. and then given 5 minutes to solve the first part of the escape game, and then only allowed to proceed to the second part for another 5 minutes, but if we fail, we’ll need to re-queue and had to go through the haunted house section again, before we can challenge the escape room part again.
(Scooby Holmes: I think it was scary.. but I’ve no idea.. I just stayed in the middle of everyone the whole time.. these places is where either something would come up in front of you.. or behind you… )
How were the games?
The 4 mini games were mainly logical, puzzles are generally ok, they do try to tie it to the theme but due to the length of the game, the immersion just falls short, not to mention once we grasped some momentum, we solved it very fast, from 6 mins to 4 mins to 2 mins.. Each game somehow always have a directional lock and another combination lock, in which, once solved, will contain a paper saying “You’ve successfully Escaped”
Maybe due to it being a rainy night, there aren’t too much crowd waiting in line for the games, hence it’s fairly enjoyable wait for us. However, we could imagine that if there’s 3 groups queuing in line… means it’s easily a 20-30 minutes wait, and since there are 4 games, means we might spend half the night on queue.
The haunted house was mainly to scare than for solving.. since they purposely put a lot of jump scare points even we’re already in the escape game section… We didn’t manage to complete the haunted house game since we had to take a long walk back and go through the haunted section again before we can challenge again. The first time we just failed miserably.
Was it worth it?
We did generally enjoyed the whole thing.. and since we’ve purchased it earlier, spending the night like this for only RM28 is quite worth it. We did get more vouchers to play in escape room games, so at least we didn’t come back empty handed either.
In summary, thumbs up for the cosplayers for doing a great job and thanks the organizers for hosting something different. We do look forward for upcoming events, but we wished there were more.
Featured image taken from Escape Event’s page.