There's a certain irony that comes from playing an escape room type game while in lockdown. Sure you can finish the game, but you can't leave the room.
That being said, it is a new way to keep yourself entertained and don't we all need a little bit of that right now?
Canberrans who may be missing the escape room experience will be happy to know that Fyshwick's Revelation Puzzle Rooms are crowdfunding an at-home escape room game called Vanish.
"There are a lot of at-home escape room games out there but I wanted to make one like our physical escape rooms which are quite immersive and story-driven," the game's designer Sheannon Tibbitts says.
"So I did a detective-style at-home game where you're a retired police officer, and you're working from home for your old cop friend.
"He's doing the detective work for you but you're getting the evidence and going through it and figuring out the different little objectives, so that's how it creates that immersion."
If the working from home element of the game wasn't close enough to reality for most of us already, the context of the case that you're investigating certainly is.
Fans of the Canberra escape room will know that all of its physical rooms have a virus theme - even before the pandemic. The rooms see players try and defeat the fictional virus Valerium, whether it's finding a cure, stopping the spread or finding the person who unleashed it in the first place.
And Vanish follows on from this same storyline - although no prior knowledge of the other physical rooms is not needed and in fact, international game lovers who have already helped with crowdfunding don't even know the physical escape rooms exist.
"In the Cold Case room you're trying to track down a man called Arthur, who is suspected of killing his wife, Ava, and he's a running theme throughout all of our rooms," Tibbitts says.
"Then in the game that I've designed, you're trying to locate Ava. So that's a little tidbit that we kind of put in just for Revelation customers, because obviously people don't care about the detail if you haven't been to our store, in particular, but we did tell Revelation customers because they do like the consistent storyline."
Crowdfunding may seem like an odd thing for a business to do when it comes to releasing a new product, but platforms such as Kickstarter - which is where the Vanish fundraiser is hosted - is a popular way to get games such as this one off the ground.
"We are a small business and we don't have a lot of extra money to throw at these things," Tibbitts says.
"Just because game props are so in-depth and very specific, we've only been able to find one manufacturer that can do all those things and their minimum order quantities are 1500.
"That's where our goal for our Kickstarter is $28,000 comes in. It also includes shipping to Australia, fulfilment in Australia, all those little extra costs that are hidden throughout. We just couldn't absorb all the costs with Revelation."
To help fund Vanished go to kickstarter.com.
