"Hey, you up there! Just chill out!"

overview

The year is 1956... or is it? With all you’ve experienced in recent weeks, it’s hard to trust even that. You went to sleep once night, and woke up here at Overbrook Hospital. The place promises care and peace for the mentally ill, but all you’ve received is manipulation, experimentation, and a heavy supply of drugs. Besides that, you’re not insane, and never have been. The whole place is a ruse, devised to cover the mind-control experiments of a group of twisted scientists.

However, you won’t allow them to use you any longer. A situation at the other side of the hospital has diverted the staff’s watching eyes. It is the perfect chance for escape, and it may be your last. Find the medicines needed to restore your senses before finding your way out of this living nightmare before your mind is lost forever.

I'm not gonna lie to you. None of this story matters. In the end, you're in a padded room / weird lab-like bloody room that you need to get out of. There's no sign you're in Overbrook Hospital, or that you've been drugged, or that the guards are busy. It's simply a padded room with blood, and then a couple rooms of lab-like dark rooms. And in the end, the story doesn't matter. You simply have to find a vial that says "you win". 

I'll also note that this game is not scary in the slightest, so if that was a worry, forget it. 

That's it for story. Let's get on to the quick stats, shall we?

quick stats

gameplay time: 60 minutes

recommended team size: 2-4 players

difficulty: 4/5

scare level: 1/5

location: Boston, MA

website: https://paniqescaperoom.com/boston/en

considerations: -low lighting conditions -claustrophobic

scenic

After the game, the way I would try to describe what Insane Asylum felt like is this: if Boda Borg built a 60 minute game. (I'm talking about one of the higher quality rooms like Spook House or Alcatraz.)

The scenic was actually good. The walls of the spaces were especially given detail, which I appreciated. The first room was a bit lackluster, consisting of little more than a white room with padded walls and blood, but the second and third room looked nice. Weathering was applied in the right places, spiderwebs were used (but not in excessive amounts), and the whole asylum looked dark and foreboding. It worked, and looked better than the majority of decent rooms out there. Unfortunately, it didn't really convey asylum, but who cares, because the story didn't matter in the end anyway. 

The game takes up a pretty small footprint. The total space of this game is about the size of a decently large room in a high quality game. This problem could easily be solved by simply figuring out a way to combine the second and last rooms, as they look pretty similar. 

puzzles

I hope you like mazes of all sorts!

If I recall correctly, there were five different types of mazes in this room, from a magnet maze to a key maze to a sliding puzzle. Most of the puzzles in this game were simply tactile challenges. There was a maze table where you had to get an object from one side to the other, a rush hour style puzzle inside a case, and a claw machine style game in a fish tank. 

As fun as it is to solve some of these puzzles, there's a few major gripes. First, it starts to blur the definition of an escape room if all the puzzles are physical and require minimal mental effort. Secondly, what is a maze table and a fish tank doing in an insane asylum? And third, including too many of them makes the experience feel like you're doing mazes in a room that happens to be themed. In general, none of the puzzles connected to the story in the slightest. 

About half of our gameplay was spent on a puzzle involving getting a key from the bottom of a glass maze to the top by using metal rods through little holes in the glass to hook the key's ring and carry it through the maze. It was much harder than it needed to be. 

I also have to address the issue of tech. Sometimes it worked flawlessly, and in other places it severely needed work. Multiple times throughout the game, we opened compartments without knowing we did so. This could easily be fixed by a noise or lighting showing what we had done. In addition to this, the hints alternatively came from a screen on the first room or in the game's audio system. We didn't like having to dash back to the first room for a clue, and the audio was so poor that we couldn't understand our game master if anyone else was talking. On the other end of the spectrum, many puzzles had working tech to open cabinets, the sensors had a wide range to avoid fiddling with pieces, and everything opened as it was supposed to. It's surprising to see such bad tech in a room that proved on multiple occasions they know how to use it. 

The second room had the best puzzles by far. It was the only room that felt remotely like a traditional escape room. Almost every puzzle was decently fun to solve, and PanIQ introduced a concept that got us excited whenever we found a piece of the larger puzzle (not a physical piece, luckily). 

The first room was easily the worst. When we walked into the near empty padded cell, our game master told us that out of 600 groups that played, only 2 got out of the first room in 10 minutes without clues, and that if we needed a clue, we should press the hint button. We would also be let into the second room after 10 minutes no matter what. It turns out that the reason only 2 groups made it through was because it was one of the most illogical puzzles I've seen in a while. It felt like it was hard for the sake of being hard. It didn't make sense and sent a bad tone for the rest of the experience, which was slightly lifted by the second room. 

pros and cons

pro: pretty good scenery that does the job!

con: filled with maze tables and other tactile puzzles that don't belong. 

pro: second room has decent puzzles!

con: one of our favorite set pieces contributed to nothing. it was still fun to play around with, though. 

pro: we escaped with 4:44 left! cool number!

pro/con: some tech is amazing and some is awful (the speaker hint system in particular). 

con: the game's footprint is tiny, and it wasn't helped by trying to include 3 rooms (the first room felt like it was once a laundry room). combining some of the rooms would make this game fit a lot more people. 

pro: our "ambience" was insane people screaming in the background. I loved it. 

con: first room is bad and frankly unnecessary. 

con: one puzzle took about 20 minutes to complete. luckily, there were other things to do in the meantime, but one unfortunate friend had to work on that puzzle for the longest time. 

con: the game lacks a finale. we felt no joy when we pushed a couple buttons and got the medicine. 

con: at about $40 per person, this is one of the costlier rooms in Boston. 

overall

Insane Asylum is quite a mixed bag. Although it's not a very well designed game, it's still fun to play with a few friends. When I say a few, I mean a few - if you take more than three people, you will be cramped. Anything above four would be pure claustrophobia. It appears that PanIQ prioritized their number of games rather than space. Still, it's a decent experience, and if you can't get to the better (and cheaper) ones elsewhere in Boston, this is a good fallback. Why not grab a couple friends and go tell insane people to "chill out". 

rating

5/10