Icarus

Icarus is Lock Chicago’s hardest room, and I can see why. The puzzles were a mess, with one of them breaking down on us, the other having literally wrong cluing, and the rest being generally unfun. The game is indeed difficult. There is tech, but don’t be fooled. It’s low functioning tech. It’s a nonlinear room technically, but I couldn’t at all tell you the flow for each of the machines. To even get puzzles to function, you have to turn them on by opening locks, for which the solutions are all over the place. It actually hurts my brain thinking about the room. Many of the puzzles require you to follow instructions from a manual of laminated sheets. Some of the instructions are convoluted. Our game master was somewhat inattentive, and we had to call the GM over outside the room to address a broken prop and flashlight. By the way, we only had one flickering light for all 5 of us. Also, the set design is nothing to get excited about. It’s supposed to be an alien jungle, but prepare to enter a world of several wonky machines in a room filled with hanging leaves. The fact that the GM had to give us explicit instructions on how the machines and the final puzzle worked before we even entered was a red flag that this was going to be a nonsense room. The final puzzle input was a cute ending for our team at least, but it didn’t make up for the unsatisfactory experience. If you land on this planet in your travels, fly away fast…