Virtual X-Caper
26 April 2020
Online
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
Today was invited by Love PopUps London to try out the brand new online escape game Virtual X-Caper by Agent November. I’ve played some Agent November adventures before and they’re always very immersive and fun, so I was very much looking forward to this actual escape adventure. I really miss escape rooms, so getting a lockdown escape fix is super fun right now.
While most companies try to set up their lockdown adventures with puzzles that are mostly played online or printed at home, Agent November go above and beyond by having built an actual escape room and popped one of their agents in it, tasking your team with actually navigating the agent around the puzzles and obstacles to solve this challenge!
The premise fits with their usual secret agent theme, Agent November was captured by a super criminal and is locked up and incapacitated, but luckily this agent is fitted with cybernetic enhancements, so we can communicate with him and see what he sees. Still somewhat woozy and disoriented from being drugged when captured, the agent needs all the help he can get to navigate his way to freedom and get back to work against the supervillains of this world.
The game is set up through Zoom, where you can communicate with the agent and also see his POV video feed. We had a few minor tech issues, but that’s probably down to how old my own laptop is, it doesn’t jive with Zoom very well… But once we had figured the tech issues out, it was super fun to tell the agent what to do, what to look at, what to try. It basically felt like a classic 90s adventure point and click game where you navigate your character through the action and decide every step. We got some minor hints here and there, but mostly our agent only did exactly what we told him to do, not giving anything away and not even surreptitiously looking at things just out of view, we had to be very clear with what we wanted him to try.
It was almost like actually being in an escape room with the added difficulty of not actually being there but navigating someone else through the room. We had so much fun trying to figure out the variety of puzzles, including some new ideas I have never come across in other escape rooms that has us stumped for a bit but were really entertaining once we figured them out!
Out of all the virtual escape rooms I’ve played so far, this has got to be the very best. I cannot recommend this experience enough. I know they’re sold out for most of their availability slots, but if you at all can, do grab a slot and play this really fun adventure! We managed to escape with a minute and twentynine seconds left on the clock! For the last five minutes I was super stressed thinking we wouldn’t have enough time to make it out, but we juuuust about scraped by.
The only problems we had were minor tech issues and a few user caused issues with the associated website, but that was all on us and not really Agent November’s fault. So, thank you agent Nathan for a really fun hour.