Pod klobúkom - "The Story Begins...", "Quarantine", "Microscoped"

Photos provided by Pod klobúkom

Company: Pod klobúkom

Country: Slovakia 🇸🇰

Language: English, Slovakian, Czech

Type of Game: Digital Puzzle Game 💻

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After purchasing the game, you'll receive an email with login details. Make sure you select "English" as the language when purchasing as the game is also available in Slovakian. Your teammates can use the same login and password (up to 5) to access the game. Press "start" at the same time to play the game together (although it's not synced in anyway).

At the beginning of each puzzle, there'll be an automatic audio read of the backstory. We recommend wearing headphones (if playing with a team over Zoom) or mute the site or yourself you can also read the text format of the backstory if that's your preference. The puzzles are always given in forms of images. This is not a clickable game. You'll just need to interpret the information from the images given and solve the puzzles. Only one team member need to enter the solution. This will unlock the chapter for the rest of the team. For some reason, when we tried this method, it didn't unlock for the rest of the team so we just had to enter the passwords separately. It would've been nice if after "unlocking" the puzzle, the page could automatically take us to the next puzzle instead of us having to click the "back" button on the website in order to click on to the next chapter. The website was also loading quite slow for some of our players due to this action that they had to take.

The online platform also offered hints that could be taken if your team gets stuck. A full solution was revealed at the end if the "nudging" hints are not helpful. If you do decide to take a hint, points will be deducted from the final score. If you want to make it onto the leader board, you might want to consider not using hints unless its absolutely necessary. At times, it's so hard to hold back on that urge of wanting to press the hint button....

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Game: The Story Begins...

Genre: Detective

Date Played: 12/8/2020

Difficulty (based on 2 players): 5/10

Size of Team: Recommend a team of 2 - 5pp (ages 12+)

Time: Unlimited (suggested time 30-90 mins)

Price: Free

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A mysterious envelope was delivered under our doors. What could this be? Our journey to the "Biohazard" trilogy begins here...

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There are 5 fun ciphers in this puzzle. If you are an experienced puzzler, you might get 4 of them with ease. The last one might take you a bit longer. If you haven't encountered many ciphers before, this could be a great "lesson" for you and it'll get you prepared and warmed up for the next two episodes.

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It took us a bit of time to get use to their online game portal. We wasted a bit of time wondering why nothing happened after we entered the right answer until we realized we had to press the "back" button to unlock the next chapter. We enjoy the added option of the voice read backstory and music at the beginning of each puzzle. It gave the game more context than just a puzzle hunt. We didn't use any hints for this game so we're glad to make it onto the leader board!

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Game: Quarantine

Genre: Sci-Fi

Date Played: 1/16/2021

Difficulty (based on 4 players): 6.5/10

Size of Team: Recommend a team of 2 - 5pp (ages 15+)

Time: Unlimited (suggested time 1.5-3 hrs )

Price: €25/ Team

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You're stuck at home under a mandatory home quarantine in a pandemic. Since there's nothing else to do, you begin to wonder if there's any secrets hidden in this new house you just purchased. I mean what else is there to do?

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Our game started with a funny audio intro. There were 10 puzzles in this game. You can definitely feel the progression on the difficulty level from the "free" game above. The puzzles were all pretty creative and most of them were multi-step puzzles. One music puzzle felt like there were outside knowledge required (I'm glad we had some 80s music lovers on our team). There was one imagery that was used in a puzzle that potentially could raise our recommended age group to 18+. Since our teammates were also experienced puzzlers, this game still felt like a 5/10 in terms of level of difficulty. What raise the bar was the last puzzle. You really had to be good at spatial recognition, memory along with some added patience.

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We played the game with a total of 4 players over Zoom and finished the game in 1 hour and 7 minutes. It's been awhile since we've played a game that concentrated more on the puzzle side than story (although we really enjoyed the humor in this storyline). This is probably our favorite game out of this trilogy set and it seems like the player agrees as it made it as a "finalists" on "Bullseye Award - Player's Choice".

𝔼𝕊ℂ𝔸ℙ𝔼𝕋ℍ𝔼ℝ𝕆𝕆𝕄𝕖𝕣𝕤❜ ℙ.𝕀.𝕤❜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕦𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕤

Stacey M.

An enjoyable room with some pretty complex puzzles. The room is very linear. It plays more like a series of distinct puzzles than an escape room. That is, you are given only the information you need to solve the current puzzle rather than a room with various elements and clues all at once and you can only move onto the next puzzle once you solve the current one.

The puzzles definitely increase with difficulty as you go along. One thing to note is that some outside knowledge is required to solve these and you will like need to use the internet to look up facts. Although, some sensitive players may take issue with a photo that appears part-way through (nothing gruesome or R-rated).

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Jorge L.

Quarantine was a fun and challenging adventure that took our team of 4 a few minutes over an hour to finish. With one exception, the puzzles increased in difficulty along the way, which is perfect for those that like challenging adventures and puzzles with great "Ah!" moments. For pros, the puzzles were quite fresh. Nothing felt repetitive in nature either against itself or from other adventures that a standard escape room player would recognize. The humor in the storyline was also quite nice as it aided in building into each of the puzzles that were at hand. For cons, we did find the website loading speeds to be quite slow for most of the adventure, but otherwise we were easily able to keep up with our team and enjoy our escape as a group!

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Game: Microscoped

Genre: Sci-Fi

Date Played: 1/16/2021

Difficulty (based on 4 players): 8/10

Size of Team: Recommend a team of 2 - 5pp (ages 15+)

Time: Unlimited (suggested time 3-4 hours)

Price: €25/ Team

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Our investigation finally led us to a suspicious building for the company Animexit. Someone has been leaving breadcrumbs so we can find this place. Is this company a cover up for an organization for developing biological weapons? Are you ready to find out the truth?

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Since the game is played in a linear way, we had to solve the puzzles together as a team. Once again we had 4 ppl playing this over zoom. For some reason (unless I remembered wrong), there was no "read out loud" option for the backstory on this game like the other two. We missed that component. My initial thought was that the puzzles were going to get progressively harder like the other two but this one was quite mixed. Some puzzles took us minutes to complete where as others had us staring at the computer screen for 30 minutes. We did have an issue with one puzzle. We spoke to another good friend of ours after the game as well that on that specific puzzle and we all agreed that there's definitely an error in the solution. We were able to get the solution without using a hint by visualizing the letters and unscrambling it but the explanation on the solution didn't agree with what we figured out as an answer. We were quite happy with the rest of the multi-step puzzles though as they all gave us that satisfying "aha" moment.

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This game would be quite challenging for beginner puzzlers. Since most puzzles took multiple steps to complete,, there were a lot of things you'll have to recognize and associate together. Some Googling may be required for some outside knowledge. This time the final puzzle was surprisingly not difficult. I guess it was a reward from the company to celebrate our escape from this trilogy journey especially when we played ep 2 and eps 3 back to back!

𝔼𝕊ℂ𝔸ℙ𝔼𝕋ℍ𝔼ℝ𝕆𝕆𝕄𝕖𝕣𝕤❜ ℙ.𝕀.𝕤❜ 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕦𝕘𝕙𝕥𝕤

Mindy Z.

The puzzles are creative, as it ties in to the story and fun. It has a range of variety and difficulty levels on the puzzle. Overall, fun experience and enjoyable.

Lee B.

I am personally very fond of puzzle games that are very puzzle-focused, and require pondering on. Story and plot are also great, but sometimes "pure" puzzle games are fantastic. Microscoped does have a storyline, but its main focus is indeed the puzzles, and they are a lot of fun! They had a usually increasing level of difficulty, and a few of them did leave us thinking for quite a while until we cracked them. An absolutely fun game, and I will definitely play a similar game again!

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(If you do decide to try this game, give us a shoutout or tag us on social media so we know you heard it from "ESCAPETHEROOMers"!)

Disclosure: We thank Pod klobúkom for providing us with a sample of their game. Although a complimentary experience was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.

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