Project Ðelta
Fury team: Alla Danabasheva, Velina Tomova, Hristo Tomov, Dimitar Smilyanov, Nadezhda Danabasheva
Date: April 15, 2019
Our time: 94:00 minutes
The World Escape Room Championship is over. It’s time for fun. The first room we chose to book in London on the recommendation of so many people is the Ðelta Project.
I begin my review with the fact that this is not my room. I continue with the fact that it doesn’t matter if it is my room or not.
The Ðelta Project is the room that, perhaps of all the rooms I have played, is mostly driven by story. As Hristo has pointed out several times, the script is like a well-made sci-fi series; there are many unknowns, there are many twists and turns, there is an unexpected ending, and at the center of it, all are we, the crew of the Venus spacecraft, with our goal being biological experiments on another planet to colonize it through genetic engineering and make it habitable for humans.
Now is the time to remind you that the game master of any room can either “break it or make it for you” or, in other words, prepare you for a great adventure or do the opposite. For me, at Archimedes Inspiration, the opposite was true. The lady who greets us is kind and apparently interested in us having a great adventure, but … First, she talks very long, and second, she speaks very quietly. All the while, I almost didn’t hear half the words coming out of her mouth. We have been told repeatedly that the room is terribly difficult, that no power is required, that we must read, that we must be concentrated, that we must be careful, that we must coordinate, and that we must have focus. At the end of this briefing, I didn’t feel like an athlete ready to set records but like a bored student when he heard the final bell. This affected my game also, while we were playing, constantly in my mind, I thought that the solution couldn’t be that easy, because the room would have to be extremely complicated. I felt tied up, not touching anything. There was some weird part in this briefing before the game about the videos in the room; we can repeat some of them, but some parts of them we can’t. This made me incredibly anxious, watching parts of video stories all the time, trying to concentrate, but a red light flashed in my head, constantly warning me that I would now miss something critical to our survival and no longer have access to it. In a nutshell, the girl really overdid it, which prevented me from living the room to the fullest.
But enough for my personal moods. Extremely clever use of space. I’ve only seen such a thing in one room in Sofia, and it’s The Lost One. Great audio puzzle, maybe my favorite thing about this room. Flying Spaceship has a role for everyone: remote control, module pilots, and navigators. It is a bit of a long conversation with AI, which, in the end, still proves that we humans are still smarter than artificial intelligence, for now.
A genetic engineering system (operated by a space blaster, for God’s Sake!) and a Star Trek-ish portal I won’t even mention all contribute a great deal to the atmosphere. We manage to get out in less than 100 minutes (the time limit of this game), and the game master comes to explain to us the gaps in the story that we have created ourselves and to answer the questions whose answers we haven’t found. Everything comes into place, and in fact, it is very logical; it would probably have been a great feeling if we had found everything ourselves.
Still, I have to say. Here, they made us the most epic team photo ever made and, by far, my favorite escape room photo. Additionally, the picture is real, and I carry it in my phone case from this day up until now.
Most. Badass. Crew. Ever.