After decades of exploring Hyrule as the hero Link in various Legend of Zelda games, it finally felt as if my time had come to rescue the Princess Zelda and save Hyrule in person from the evil clutches of Ganon. This was my feeling as a result of the announcement of SCRAP’s Defenders of the Triforce Escape Room; a live role-playing escape room experience based on The Legend of Zelda. With nothing but my wit, years of puzzle-solving experience and a party of like-minded adventurers, we were prepared for any type of trap or obstacle in our way. At least, that’s what we were hoping and instead we found out the experience had plenty of paperwork involved.
Defenders of the Triforce isn’t your typical escape room. You don’t find yourself locked in a room searching for clues by solving puzzles because your end goal is to exit the room before time runs out. Instead, it begins with your group sitting in a ballroom together with 20+ other teams. Every group has the same goal. It’s just a matter of which groups are able to finish first.
Once you sit down for the experience, you are introduced to the story of Defenders of the Triforce. The narrative is set in the timeline of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, with a twist. Link and Zelda were defeated by Ganon and have been locked away for the last seven years. With your help, the recently awoken Link must find the Master Sword to defeat Ganon. However, in order to do so, you will have to work with your team to solve math problems, decipher codes and learn the Hyrulian language (with the help of a chart luckily) as you turn in worksheets to different taskmasters who run one of four different areas you travel to as a team.
While the event wasn’t extravagantly decorated to look like it was pulled straight out of Hyrule, it still had a simple yet cheesy look to it. Each corner was set up to look similar to one of four different places straight out of the game, including Zora’s Domain, Kokiri Forest, Goron City and finally the Temple of Time. Solving the puzzles will set you off to visit each area, which tends to revolve around “take this worksheet to Zora’s Domain only to get another worksheet and item, and continue on ’til the next puzzle tells you to do something similar.” Since the escape room has only four areas to visit, you will visit each area more than once. Of course, having so few areas with over 100 people in the room has its own set of challenges, which are usually centered around waiting in line for another group to finish before proceeding, or even an adventure of trying to get out of your seat while dodging people and tables as you work your way to each area.
Despite our team failing to complete the quest by the end of the time limit (we were stuck on the final puzzle), it didn’t feel like an hour had gone by. While having to solve back-to-back puzzles wasn’t exactly the way my team pictured this event, we left feeling quite satisfied (even with a few hiccups that were not fully planned out). Overall, you could feel how much effort went into making this a fun and enjoyable experience for everyone, even though parts of the escape room did feel like extracurricular homework. Ganondorf might have escaped our grasp, but with the Defenders of the Triforce Escape Room happening until next month, you still might have the opportunity to beat him!
from Nerd Reactor
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