After a long wait, Breakout finally expanded its’ wings and opened in NU Sentral~! As we are a big fan of Breakout rooms, we went on their first day of operations, and played the only playable room: The Testament of Tesla.
As ambitious as we are, we usually just play with whoever we can call, but it’s only 3 of us (haha.. please do contact us if you wanna join us next time, or just rant on our writings, we are glad to listen). Usually this number is ok.. but we were wrong for this room, there were quite a few puzzles that need back and forth movement between the rooms plus some stages where the group forced to split.. hence we were quite a few puzzles behind when we ran out of time, not to mention the notion i did that made it worse (more on that later)
The story goes like this, we’re in a post-apocalyptic era where all natural resources has depleted and mankind is forced to lived in darkness, and unbeknownst to us, Nikola Tesla has built a secret power plant that runs on clean energy but was denied publicity due to political and commercial reasons, and now we’re given the tasks to restore this plant before it is lost forever.
You can read the full text on Breakout’s website
I personally liked the theme, and the room make good use of the theme, as there’s a lot of places with total darkness and we need light to be able to continue our escape. The brilliance of needing to make use of limited resource (RFID card) and lighting up a portion of the room via many switches (RFID readers) is fun and we have to be creative in the way we use it.
There’s one stage where the group is forced to split due to magnetic locked sliding doors is a neat touch, which is where our member count fall short as me and Jing was locked out while leaving Zhong alone to help us search for clues, and after we unlocked ourselves and proceed to the next room, I was curious about the mechanism and i accidentally locked both of them in the next room, without any way to unlock them (-_-“) making me the only one able to go back and forth searching and solving… in which eventually time ran out and we lost with 3 more puzzles to go..
All in all, as we’re anticipating to being awed again by Breakout, this room does deliver. It retains it’s polished decoration, brilliant puzzle (although some are too vague for deduction, at least for us), yet adding more escaping mechanics for us to enjoy, plus the need for more members is a fresh twist from the alpha solver syndrome that plagues quite many rooms.
In addition, Breakout still does offer one of the best experience overall with their helpful and lively game master, the informational briefing, the walk-through after the game ends, as well as letting us finish the game even after the time runs out and asking for our feedback, while these are all minor elements as opposed to the room, it makes the whole experience a worthwhile stay and will be looking forward to the next escape.
I’m giving The Testament of Tesla a 4 shocking thumbs out of 5.
agreed that some of the puzzles were too vague, was with another 3 members but failed it too!! Chan Kin Sing