The Cabin

MPOWER is a live escape adventure room company based in Morgan Hill, California. They operate two in-person escape games – The Secret and The Cabin. We were invited to test the latter, which can now be played as a GM-led experience. A special feature: Larger groups can compete remotely against each other in battle mode. So, we randomly divided our 8 participants into two groups of equal size using a team generator.This is what came out…
Team 1: Magritte, Jackie, Lee, Sylvia (Ranger Hilary)
Team 2: Ryan, Santiago, Höfli, Heiner (Ranger Rebecca)

After a warm welcome by our two “rangers” Hilary and Rebecca, each team enters its own zoom meeting room with its GM. There we get a short briefing and are immersed into the story by a well-done video.Afterwards we discover The Cabin with telescape.live, an easy to use inventory, which provides a very good 360-degree view of the rooms and also offers zoom possibilities. The players can explore the environment independently, solve puzzles, which requires a lot of communication and teamwork, and enter and check the codes found in this way themselves. Rebecca accompanies us very sympathetically through our adventure and supports us with words and deeds.The static pictures are sometimes supplemented by video sequences when something is opened, something happens, or another room is entered. The puzzles are varied and logical and, contrary to many live video escape games, mostly non-linear, which is very suitable for playing in battle mode. Talking about we beat Lee and the girls by amazing 30 seconds at the end, which „of course“ was only due to the well-known bad internet connection in France, Scotland, and Israel 😉

We all had fun and for me it was probably the best of the GM-lead experiences we’ve played so far.