Chernobyl

On a hot sunday morning I was meeting 3 for me unknown men in Belgium to get locked up and try to escape! It sounds like the start of a horror novel, but it was far from that. At least, it were not my team mates that were scary.

We went to Ranst (near Antwerp) where we played Chernobyl at The Start. I have to be honest, I dit not read anything on forehand about the room, but I figured the name said a lot about what the story is about. We were received by a researcher, but he didn’t tell us a lot about what was going to happen, just put the lab coats on and go outside.

There we get a thorough briefing by a Sergeant and everyone gets his own role in the game. Of course the only woman has to get the task of communication. The sergeant left us and we had to find a way to get in.

The game requires a lot of teamwork, so ditch that friend who is a loner and wants to solve everything by himselfs. I really enjoyed the fact that some answers can be found on diffent ways, so you don’t get stuck in some kind of tunnel vision.

The set feels real, like you really are in an abandoned reactor of some kind and they sure know how to put some extra scare factor in it, maybe this isn’t the game for you if you don’t like jump scares, but our team wasn’t impressed (or at least act like they weren’t). Although the puzzles are not at all easy, I think the adrenalin sometimes make it harder to focus.

I also loved the debriefing were you get to see footage of how you tried to escape, where you made mistakes and where you just did a great job!

In conclusion, a really very nice room to play, both for people with experience to just enjoy the natural flow of the things you have to do, but also for a group of friends who just want to have an experience that is not the same as only going from the one puzzle to the other.