I did a Warwick Presents and This is What Happened
Not too long ago, I received an email from Warwick Presents. Usually, I’d give this email a quick read and ignore it, but we are hardly under usual circumstances…
The email invited me to join a group of students to participate in an online event the next Thursday. My mouse hovered over the ‘close tab’ icon, but my finger didn’t press down just yet. The event would be sort of in the style of an escape room, but our task would be to work out who the rogue agent from MI5 was, using a series of clues. A few seconds later, I clicked ‘close tab’.
When I logged onto the Zoom call, I was taken aback at the number of people that were on it as well. Even my module meets didn’t have this many people! A couple of people were chattering away whilst the rest of us nervously waited with our mics and cameras off. I twiddled my thumbs as I thought to myself how it wasn’t too late to quickly exit. For some reason, I was convinced everyone knew one another and I’d just be the awkward extra person. Suddenly, music blasted out of my speakers and everyone’s tiles disappeared, leaving me to focus on the centre of the screen. A young man in a suit took centre stage and, in a carefully practiced accent (think 1940s radio broadcaster reporting about the war), he explained the plan for the evening and gave the backstory to the game.
Those of you familiar with Zoom will know you can enter breakout rooms, and that’s exactly where I was placed with 4 other strangers. Well, it should’ve been 3 but we had a lovely couple sharing a laptop so there were 5 of us in total. I was the youngest, a lowly undergrad, but what was great, was that none of us knew each other. And everyone was equally friendly!
The actual game was well thought out. There were a few technical difficulties right at the start but that’s to be expected, and they were stamped out later on anyway. Some tasks were quicker to work through than others, but I felt ~blessed~ with my group as we were pretty good at dividing and conquering.
The ‘room’ took around an hour to complete and at the end, the suited-up gent announced the three groups who completed the game in the shortest amount of time. This didn’t take too long so after he revealed the winner, we all said our goodbyes and I bounded downstairs to spill the beans about my evening.
Would I recommend a Warwick Presents? Yes, I would. Maybe I was just lucky with my group, but I felt very much at ease as we cracked on with the puzzles. My main fear was that I’d either be intruding on a group of friends and so would be left out, or that I’d have a hopeless group where everyone would want to work by themselves. Being unable to socialise or even leave my house because of the pandemic meant I appreciated the 90 minutes with various people even more. The game in itself was fun. I do enjoy a good riddle and even though I’d perhaps like something a little bit more challenging, the time absolutely flew by. At the very least, I advise you give it a shot and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to sign up the next time. I’m not sure whether they’ll all be escape room-esque but I suppose that’s just something we’ll have to find out!
