Dragon's Quest is an ambitious game that feels a bit rough around the edges, perhaps because of design choices that seem aimed at favoring large groups and isn't quite dialed in for smaller ones yet. I think there's a lot of potential to this game, but it still feels like it needs tuning. Fortunately, the staff seem open to feedback and genuinely interested in improving things.
My favorite aspect was the large and visually interesting set, which isn't surprising given the company's background as a haunt. This game is a bit unusual in that I think larger groups would do well -- we played with 4 enthusiasts, and while we managed, a couple more hands would have helped due to parallelism, space, and (at times) search.
While I like games that give roles to different players, I don't think Dragon's Quest quite lands it - in retrospect, we would have done better if we had ignored the assigned roles. Somewhat confusingly, while the game explicitly prompted 1 class to split off early, it didn't continue to do this, so we spent a good fraction of the game confused about how much we were supposed to separate. From a gameplay perspective, I'm guessing the real reason is to encourage large groups to not clump up too much (i.e. players sort of get a zone of the game to cover), but this was somewhat counterproductive with a small group.
Similarly, there was one particular search task that I thought wasn't well clued, and even after we knew what and roughly where we were supposed to search, we still had a lot of trouble finding the things we needed. With a larger group, this might not be as much of an issue -- people would be more likely to randomly stumble across them.
Lighting (and sometimes lack thereof) is another issue. While I get the vibe they're going for, my group of probably older-than-average players simply had a difficult time reading or making out certain elements. It's that the whole space is too dim, but rather than certain critical spots should be lit better, or certain props should be reworked.
Things still being under construction elsewhere in the building meant that on at least two occasions, doorways looked out at clearly out-of-game areas, leading us to incorrectly conclude that those doorways were also out of play (they weren't). After the game we were told that contractors had forgotten to close doors behind them.
The finale, while thematically appropriate, suffered from pacing. Inadequate lighting resulted in a search task that I'm not sure was intentional, and killed our momentum for what should have been a climactic ending.
I think a little bit of tweaking will help smooth out the game a lot, and I don't envy the owners for trying to make a game work anywhere from 4-16 players - that's a huge range.
Particularly interesting or different
Yes
While most games advertise a large capacity but probably wouldn't be enjoyable, I think Dragon's Quest can reasonably accommodate a larger than normal group because of the physical space and the stuff to do. You'll still have the problem of missing out on stuff, but if that's not a problem for your group, then I'd still feel pretty comfortable at, say, 8.
4 enthusiasts made it through, but we had to take some hints and felt like a lot was going on. A few more people would have helped.
One effect didn't trigger as expected, leading to a bunch of confusion as we thought we had to do something else as a preliminary step, but in reality we were doing the correct thing. There was a fog effect that didn't trigger, though this wasn't a huge deal.
Physically active
Not at all
Accessibility
Lighting was dimmer than I would have liked. Some necessary details were hard to spot or read, even when we knew exactly what sort of thing we were looking for
