Alex, our soon-to-be avatar, is meeting with his therapist to confront some childhood trauma that’s been manifesting in the form of a recurring bad dream. “Is this blindfold completely necessary?” he asks. The therapist assures him that it is and continues: “Now I’m going to put you in a deep hypnotic trance, and when I snap my fingers you will be in your nightmare. You may hear some strange voices. Listen to them. They are here to help.” After the therapist does so, the blindfold comes off and we get our first look at the Night Terrors escape room. Immediately the team notes details and urges Alex to investigate his surroundings. He hesitates at first. “Who are you guys?” Alex asks. We explain that we’re his subconscious, and like the therapist said we’re here to help him get through this nightmare.

Representing a novel approach to avatar-based escape rooms, Saskatchewan-based Mystery Mansion Escape Rooms has designed and built Night Terrors exclusively for remote play. The room is slightly longer than most, allowing up to ten players seventy-five minutes to unravel the clues buried in avatar/protagonist Alex’s dreamscape to help lay to rest a traumatic series of events from his childhood. Participants gather in a Zoom room and direct Alex where they want him to search and how to solve puzzles, with occasional breaks for video clips that help flesh out the story and provide guidance for the next phase of the room.

As one might expect from the title and scenario, Night Terrors is a horror-themed room, though the horror is entirely psychological and subtle. Rather than creating a sense of impending peril, or having an ever-present threat like the demonic force in Logic Locks’ Amsterdam Catacombs, Night Terrors instead relies on the discomfort of being in a space that’s just slightly off. The room looks like a mostly-authentic recreation of a child’s bedroom – barring some uncanny valley-type touches, like a slice of the room being upside down and a judicious use of dried blood – and gradually builds tension by dropping hints as to just what has been plaguing Alex’s innermost psyche for so many years. The result is a room that’s accessible even to those who aren’t fans of horror and might be put off by rooms like My Name Is Jamie, despite the literally nightmarish plot.

In order to work well, narrative-driven rooms like Night Terrors require almost as much attention to the writing and avatar’s performance as to the room itself. This is something that Mystery Mansion Escape Rooms obviously understands and takes seriously. Creator Mitch Bresciani, who also plays Alex, does an excellent job of projecting vulnerability and anxiety befitting someone who’s stuck in their own nightmare and relying on the voices in their head to figure out how to escape. He’s also excellent at camera management – this vital skill for those stepping into the avatar role requires balancing following participant instructions, keeping elements relevant to the current puzzle in view, and subtly making sure to linger just a bit on elements the players have not yet realized they need without being obvious.

The “set-up,” or given rationale for why the players are in the room in the first place, is another easy-to-ignore aspect that adds a lot to the experience when done well, and Night Terrors offers another clever twist here. Rather than a flimsy justification for why a bunch of strangers are able to peer into Alex’s darkest nightmares, players are instead told that they represent elements of his subconscious. It’s an elegant and simple solution, and one that gives players a reason to be invested in Alex’s fate. After all, we are Alex. What happens to him, happens to us. Similarly, the hint system is crafted to fit the narrative: Rather than breaking character to ask for outside help, players instead ask Alex to rack his brain for some additional insight into the current puzzle.

Another thing Night Terrors does well from a story perspective is pacing. What starts off as a mildly unsettling dream about the “Sleepy Man” gradually becomes more and more sinister. Night Terrors is effectively broken up into acts, in which solving a collection of puzzles segues into a scripted video clip – played on a separate website and unlocked via codes delivered in-game – that serves to both set up the next sequence of puzzles and reinforce the notion that there’s more to Alex’s dreams than players first think. Even the ending hints that things may not be quite what they seem once Alex reawakens.

The puzzles in Night Terrors make for a challenging but fair experience. There are many puzzles packed into a small space, and no two are alike. Like in all good escape rooms, they require a variety of types of reasoning to solve, and often have little twists that mean the obvious solution is not necessarily the correct one. Inventory management is primarily done in the room itself; Alex’s bed provides a handy space to store things until needed, and only a few puzzle sequences use an external website to track the relevant clues. Credit needs to be given for how well it works here, because there are a LOT of props – some of which are actual childhood possessions of Bresciani. Part of that is because the mostly-linear puzzle flow ensures there are not too many objects in play at one time, but also because Bresciani himself is effective at nudging players when needed without crossing the line into hand-holding. Even with the subtle guidance, Night Terrors still offers a more than fair challenge for veteran groups, and is still doable for less-experienced teams.

One of the first things players may notice in Night Terrors is how small the room is. Unlike most avatar rooms, which tend to be built with in-person groups in mind before being adapted for remote play, Night Terrors was designed from the ground up to only ever have one person inside: the avatar. The physical space would be a tight fit for three people, let alone the ten it allows to play at once. But it works just fine for remote groups, since only Alex needs to worry about moving around the room itself. In truth, while there’s no substitute for an in-person experience, avatar-only rooms offer a couple pluses for creators. You get the same access to potentially global audiences, but it can be done markedly cheaper than a comparable in-person or hybrid experience. One reason for that is the lower space requirement, as alluded to above. But Night Terrors also demonstrates that an avatar-only room allows creators to save a fair bit of time and budget on tech. Rather than having a control room and sophisticated technology for managing puzzle elements, Bresciani is able to run Night Terrors with nothing but a 10-button remote and a little sleight of hand. This brings the price point down considerably; at $15 Canadian per player, Night Terrors is roughly half the cost of most in-person escape rooms.

And while it isn’t directly part of the experience, host Bresciani is not shy about sharing how the building in which Night Terrors is housed is both a) next door to a funeral home, and b) quite possibly haunted. He is all too happy to share ghost stories about the old building with those who ask.

Night Terrors offers players a challenging, fun, and just-a-little creepy escape room at a great price. It also represents an innovative approach to online escape rooms through its avatar-only approach, which allows Mystery Mansion to produce a world-class escape room more cheaply and simply than comparable in-person or hybrid rooms. Creators looking to develop new rooms for remote play might want to take note.

To learn more about Mystery Mansion or book one of their rooms, you can visit their website here. You can also follow them on Facebook or Instagram for news and other updates. Check out our Event Guide for more escape rooms and immersive entertainment throughout the year.

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