On The Trail Of Hocus @ Breakout Nu Sentral

Today’s session of Breakour @ Nu Sentral had been planned more than a month ago so despite several team members not being able to make it, some at the last minute, the games had to go on. For the 1st session The Secret Of Hocus, there were just 3 of us while for the 2nd session The War For Rembrandt, there were 4 of us. I had a feeling we’d have a tough time tracking down the mysterious criminal magician, Mr. Hocus with just half our usual team. We’d failed to track down Mr. Hocus @ Breakout Ave K when we played The Chamber Of Hocus. Would we have better luck here?

Success or failure doesn’t really matter especially when you are with people you like hanging out with. It’d be sheer torture to be stuck in a confined room for 10 minutes, never mind 45 minutes with people you can’t stand the sight of, let alone being inches from them. It’s very different when you are with people you get along with and share the same mindset and insight. As we had less than 6 people for each game, we could only take on a few characters. We chose the essential ones like Time Bender (can ask for 5 extra minutes), Scholar (can gain 1 direct hint upon request any time during gameplay), Oracle (hints or photos will be shown to The Oracle before game commences) and Lock Master (before game play, Lock Master will be shown a set of numbers which comes in useful during game play).

So we played The Secret Of Hocus first. When we entered the room, it felt like we were backstage at a magician’s and indeed we were as we had entered Mr. Hocus’s secret theatre. There’s some physical activity involved in this game and I felt that 45 minutes was hardly enough as we needed quite a bit of time to accomplish one task which we never completed (time ran out) and which we felt would have required a lot of skill and time to complete. Even if we had 6 team members, we would probably not have been able to accomplish that task in time. In one of the rooms, the ambiance is quite mystical. It does require a lot of thinking out of the box and you will go “Ooooooh!” once the mechanics are explained to you after the game is over. I wish this game had a longer duration as there are a number of tasks involved. This is probably the most challenging game I have played at Breakout Nu Sentral or make that Breakout anywhere.

We were so floored and defeated by Chamber Of Hocus. We then had to ready ourselves for The War For Rembrandt. Since this one only has a difficulty level of 2/5, we reckoned we’d have a better/higher chance of escaping especially since we were joined by another member. 4 brains are surely better than 3!

Now I wouldn’t say The War For Rembrandt isn’t challenging. It involves some physical activity too and we spent way too long on one task. However we were lucky in this game as we escaped with more than a minute to spare. It is an interesting game albeit not as complicated as our earlier session. The War For Rembrandt is a good game for escape game beginners.

The latest game at Breakout Nu Sentral is Terraform and that has a difficulty level of 5/5. It’s so popular that it’s been booked solid till I don’t know when. I can see there are plenty of escape game enthusiasts in town. I’d like to get better at this genre, hopefully practice makes perfect.

Our Game Master is the same Game Master from our very 1st sessions at Breakout Nu Sentral. I like her a lot because she is very helpful without giving us direct hints since that would spoil the game. Thanks to her and to the exciting themes at Breakout, I would do this all over again any time. I can’t guarantee that you will escape in time from Breakout but I can guarantee you will have loads of fun there!