When @russbuilds announces a new game on his Instagram page, I am always quick off the mark to book us on. Russ has gained a reputation over lockdown for building innovative games that push the boundaries of what you might expect from an amateur escape room designer. In fact, I named the second game of his that I played, Airlock, my best escape room of lockdown.
His latest offering, Citizen, is no different.
Citizen
Four crime scenes. One thief at large. A race against the clock. Can you catch them in time?
~ Citizen, @russbuilds
Theming
Having nailed the quality of his puzzles several games ago, Russ has turned his attention to the trickier aspect of a virtual escape room – the theming.
Firstly, Russ continues to choose settings where the remote avatar-style of his games fits very well. This time, we have tracked down a criminal mastermind who is so sure of his genius that he has challenged us to solve his puzzles. If we succeed, he will hand himself in. If we fail… well, I was expecting him to say he would kill us, but instead he would vanish without a trace. His previous games involved defusing the Cold War missile and rescuing an astronaut trapped in an airlock, which both made sense for us to be sending instructions rather than doing things ourselves. I don’t think this setting was quite as clear cut, but it didn’t detract overall.
For Airlock, he provided a thematic playlist to play during the game, and he did the same again for Citizen. It does require the player to have Spotify Premium (else you risk having your concentration jolted by ads), but if you do it adds a subtle atmosphere to the game. The tracks are instrumental and aren’t distracting, as I initially worried they would be.
This time, Russ was playing the role of the criminal mastermind who we were tracking down. It started with a pre-recorded audio track to relay the character’s motivations and plan, and he asked us to refer to him using his character’s name throughout the game (though if we did slip up and call him Russ, we wouldn’t be penalised). The fact that he was playing a character didn’t have a huge impact on gameplay, but I do love it when hosts go a bit above and beyond.
And the visual design of the puzzles themselves were again very satisfying. They still look quite homebrew, but the technical elements are very impressive, they’re visually pleasing and, most importantly, they work smoothly!
Puzzles
As I’ve already said, I think Russ is just excellent at creating puzzles. They’re very varied, require out-of-the-box thinking and utilise more innovative inputs than I see in lots of professional escape rooms. There’s no four-digit numerical locks here!
Tim and I were lucky because for each of the puzzles, one of us tended to be able to look at it and understand the mechanism behind it very quickly. This is partly due to our overall experience with escape rooms, and also our experience with Russ’s games in particular – like most escape rooms, you get to understand the language that the game is speaking once you’ve played a few. However, Russ did manage to catch us out with a few very clever twists: one in particular had us almost ready to ask for a clue, although we did manage to figure it out ourselves just before giving into temptation.
If I had one criticism of Citizen’s puzzles, it was that the final puzzle was simply entering information we’d already gathered elsewhere. However this is a very minor criticism as the theatre that accompanies this puzzle had us clenching our jaw in tension as he input our solution!
After the game, Russ calculates a score for your team, and ranks all teams on a leaderboard for the game. I wasn’t initially a fan of this idea but it has definitely grown on me with each game of his that I’ve played. I even checked the leaderboard before playing the game this time, and knew that 12.5 was the score to beat – which we soundly managed with an impressive 14 points!
Summary
Play this game. Just go play it.
Theme: 4/5 | Puzzles: 5/5 | Difficulty: 3/5
Clue system: just ask (penalty applied)
Success: yes, 27:29 remaining