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January 30, 2007

Ravenchase Chicago: Treasure Hunting in the Windy City

Ravenchase Adventures bills itself as a "real adventure" using "riddles, anagrams, puzzles, actors, the far reaches of imagination and more," and warns that it "may be more fun than you can handle." They hold events around the country (upcoming locations include Honolulu, Chicago again next month, Baltimore, Manhattan, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and others) and will be putting on a national treasure hunt in July.

Since I really enjoyed playing Tombstone Hold 'Em and have always been envious of those who've gotten to participate in events like the Go Game or Jane McGonigal's oeuvre, a Ravenchase race to a final location determined via clues at downtown Chicago landmarks seemed like a perfect opportunity to get my puzzle hunt fix. I headed to Chicago to meet up with fellow ARGNet writer Krystyn Wells and two other crewmembers from my beekeeping days.

On Saturday, Team Beekeepers assembled around the Chagall mosaic at 3:00 and got our beautifully-rendered treasure maps, along with a packet of clues. Roughly two hours later, we'd cracked our final puzzle and were headed to the final meet-up point. I have mixed feelings about the experience.

In any puzzle design, the puzzle maker has to weigh the potential for frustration against the desire to make the puzzle difficult enough that solving it is rewarding for players. At a live event, especially when it's a race, any intuitive leaps asked of the players have to be reasonably small, since their time and resources are far more limited than in an online game. Even taking that into account, however, the intuitive leaps demanded by Ravenchase were so limited that they were essentially nonexistent. The result was that solving the riddles felt more like checking off a shopping list than solving a mystery, and there weren't really any of the "aha!" moments that make puzzle-solving so rewarding. The experience would have benefited enormously from opportunities for players to exercise their own creativity and feel good about solving puzzles or overcoming obstacles.

The only difficulties ended up being frustrating, rather than pleasantly challenging. In one case, the location containing an answer was closed to the public for maintenance, and in another, lack of good indicators resulted in too much ambiguity: a clue indicated that a strip of paper was hidden in a flower bed, but the flower beds covered quite a bit of territory, and we ended up giving up and coming back, only to realize, after Krystyn grabbed it, that three of us had seen the clue and ignored it because we thought it was a piece of trash. To be fair, however, our patience was probably reduced by the fact that downtown Chicago in January is not a pleasant place to be outside for several hours. I'd play Ravenchase again, but not in the upper Midwest at the height of winter.

Ravenchase did a number of things very well, however. One of the locations on the map was a red herring, and there was an adversary character who could impose a 20-minute time penalty if she got a picture of a player's face, which added a bit of excitement and aided in preventing frostbite by encouraging us to keep our scarves over our faces. If we got stuck, we could call in for hints, but they would also result in a time penalty. Hidden along the path, however, were gold coins, each of which provided a 10-minute time bonus. The prizes were fun and kitschy (our third-place finish was rewarded with a statue of the Egyptian god Horus). The size of the play space was also perfect -- big enough that it felt like we really were using the city as a game board, but small enough not to be exhausting. The criticisms I mentioned above could be fixed with a little tweaking, and may have been unique to this event rather than characteristic of Ravenchase's games as a whole.

Most importantly, Ravenchase succeeded admirably in providing one of the most lasting and satisfying side effects of ARG live events, scavenger hunts, and other pervasive games. These events make you feel connected in a very personal way to objects or locations involved in the game. I'll never look at that area of downtown Chicago the same way again: it's special to me and I feel like I got to know it far more intimately than I could have by shopping there or going to a concert in Millennium Park or staying in the area. If I have an opportunity to play again in balmier weather, I'll be there.

All event photos courtesy of Josh Monken.

Posted by Jessica Price at 8:53 AM | Comments (4)

January 20, 2007

Evidence of What?

I purchased The Adventure Company's recent release, Evidence: The Last Ritual with high hopes that it would provide immersive gameplay that would appeal to the ARGer in me. Touted as an adventure/puzzle game, Evidence is a step towards a pre-packaged ARG: there are websites to discover with voluminous content as well as in-game emails that follow your progress through the game.

Boy, are there in-game emails. There are scads of in-game emails. In fact, within 10 hours after registering the game (a necessary step in order to proceed to gameplay), I had received a whopping 28 emails - 25 of those in the first two hours. I eventually got a mail saying, "No news from you for several hours now? Are you ditching us like a pair of old socks, or what? Please, we need your help..." Nothing like a little guilt trip to make me want to pop that game right back in! Most mail was to provide clues, and several times the timing was off so that I would get clues for puzzles I had already solved.

The story behind the game is that there is a serial killer on the prowl, and he has produced this teasing, taunting set of CDs with information and clues about his victims. The CDs contain a lot of well-acted video clips which the player is rewarded with after solving puzzles. The gameplay itself is almost reminiscent of the movies Se7en or Saw, with a gritty, surreal atmosphere. The puzzles range from piece-o-cake easy to insanely difficult, and there are little to no clues about solves in some cases. What I found most difficult at times was actually being able to "catch" the right icon in order to proceed to the next puzzle -- the tiny icons bob up and down on the screen, and for those of us with bad reflexes it can be pretty frustrating.

There is a toolbar within the game that allows you to decode scrambled text, magnify portions of the screen, or perform an internet search, among other things. The MSN search is interesting; it attempts to bypass results that contain puzzle solves by adding a bunch of modifiers (as in, "-soluce -soluces -solution -astuces -astuce -walkthrough -games -game -missing") which show up in the search box after you hit Submit. This is a real slap in the face for immersion, and although the budget might not have allowed a more sophisticated search system (even like the one in Majestic), shrouding those obviously out-of-game search modifiers would have been advantageous and more player-friendly.

As I mentioned before, there are several in-game websites with a lot of information to digest. Some are better-designed than others. In addition to the information sprinkled throughout the game sites, there are also lots of clues in the video clips, requiring vigilance and a keen ear, in some cases.

Unfortunately, my gameplay came to an abrupt halt when I encountered a show-stopping bug on level three. For some reason, during the "Zar-Knum" puzzle the game thinks that I have the mouse button depressed when it is not. Checking the support website indicates that there are no patches available. I spent a good amount of time trying to decide whether it was worth it to me even to pursue a solution. Quite honestly, the game itself did not grab my interest enough to motivate me into contacting tech support. However, I found the video clips compelling, and I have been wondering what happens to the characters. For that reason only, I wrote The Adventure Company this evening to ask them about the bug.

In short, Evidence has some redeeming qualities, but overall I was most wowed with the evidence bag packaging and the nifty little way that the CDs are held in - and that's a sorry state of affairs, to be more intrigued with the wrapper than what's inside. I think that the bug probably increased my frustration level beyond repair, but between the flood of emails, the esoteric puzzle solutions, the bobbing icons, and the lack of immersion, I wish that I'd saved the $30 I paid for the game and invested it in - oh, I dunno. Something else. I wanted to like the game, I really did, but in the end, technical glitches got me down.

Posted by Dee Cook at 1:26 PM | Comments (1)