SCRAP announced “Real Zero Escape — Trust on Trial” even before I moved down to LA.
I immediately tried to organize some of my usual escape game group to make a road trip with me to play it. However, this game requires a team of nine players, and I moved down here and it fell apart. When we played “Escape from the Jail”, the staff said they could only guarantee it would be around until the end of June, but might be available longer if there was sustained demand. About halfway through June, when I realized that I was not going to be able to get a group down in time to play, I signed up to play on my own. It was the first time I played without knowing any of my teammates.
The weekend I signed up, July 1‑July 4, was when Animé Expo was in town, so there was much more activity than usual in Little Tokyo. In fact, SCRAP was running an outdoor event over the convention weekend called “Zero Escape Puzzle Hunt”. My team were all out-of-towners here for the convention, and while they were very familiar with Zero Escape, the video game theme this particular room was based on, (some of them were cosplaying as characters from the game) they did not have much escape room experience. I, on the other hand, knew nothing about Zero Escape going into this game.
WARNING: SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD!
(I describe the process but not outright answers.)
The game itself was like refined iteration of “Escape from the Jail”. The intro briefing is by video from a character from the game. The team is split into three smaller teams and placed into three separate rooms. Communication is much more difficult between the smaller teams than it was in “Escape from the Jail”, and you are more dependent on the other teams to solve the puzzles in your own room. This game had the biggest use of technology in the puzzles that I have seen from SCRAP.
In true SCRAP fashion, when your smaller team solves the individual room puzzles and gets back into the main room, all the pieces of previous puzzles are mixed up and reused for the next portion. One minor complaint I had about this stage is that the final lock in each smaller room has the same combination, so we could have just given the answer to any other team that was lagging behind on getting back to the main room. The final puzzle is a very cool synchronized event that is very nerve-racking as you try to pull it off.
The title of the game, “Trust on Trial”, and the intro briefing implied that trust is key to solving the game. I thought that meant there would be a traitor in our midst, but I was not sure how that would work since the team could nine strangers or nine best friends. Would people set aside their real relationships to play a traitor in the game? SCRAP could not count on that, so it had to be something better. There is one point in the game where we get access to our characters’ journals and need to cross-reference the statements like a zebra puzzle in order to solve the next puzzle. I thought that maybe one character would be a liar and we had to ignore or invert their statements to solve the puzzle.
The answer is a bit simpler than that. The nine of us are in deed working as a single team. We just have to “trust” that our teammates in the other rooms are good enough to solve their puzzles and help us solve our own puzzles.
END SPOILERS
All in all, a very slick SCRAP game. Mechanics-wise, possibly the best SCRAP game I have played. Puzzle-wise, fairly standard SCRAP difficulty, but the communication limitation makes it more challenging. I definitely recommend the game, but only if your team is fairly experienced in escape rooms.
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My team, of course, failed on the final puzzle.
Oh, and I saw Suta and Kazu there. I believe Yuki was working the convention, but I did not run into her. Also got to meet the very friendly SCRAP LA staff, who I am sure will soon be sick of me. Suta is a big Zero Escape fan and helped develop this game, so while we were doing the debrief, she also pointed out all the Easter eggs she had hidden for fans.