Unmasked

At the moment this is the only room Cognito has right now, but it’s quite the room. There are different elements in this room for gameplay that differs from the majority of rooms we’ve done, but also takes elements that we’ve only seen at a few other places. After a brief in-character introduction about what you’re selected to do, the game plays out and reveals elements of your story over the course of the game. There’s a lot of interesting puzzles despite the fact a lot of them are for combination/key locks. The hint system for this game is also rather interesting, as it’s done in- character and plays upon the story you’re set in. A little problem we had was we advanced a little quicker than we should have (not solving every puzzle beforehand) and made it to a part without having certain items, that also eliminated our hint system up to that point. One lock, we found out after, was altered after a previous gameplay and stalled us a bit, but somehow by random chance we got it open anyways. Despite that, all in all, it was a very impressive room (even though we didn’t get out) and was really heavy in the immersion and feeling like we’re IN the story. A puzzle in the story actually becomes very meta with something they do with you beforehand. Being the only room, and without any later bookings, the staff allowed us to finish the puzzles and complete the room. Definitely looking forward to their next rooms.

This is Cognito’s first, and as of writing this, only room. It’s an interesting idea as well as we started off by being greeted by a receptionist for a modelling agency and were shortly left on our own in the room’s “waiting room”. Without spoiling much, the story progresses fairly quickly after that. There were some very interesting elements for puzzles to this room as well that I had fun solving. There was a lot of puzzles too, almost an overwhelming amount at first but once you slowly started working through them, I thought they tied the whole story together well. The only thing I would have liked more would be less locks. Pretty much every puzzle had a lock based element at some point and it does get a little tiring. The rooms themselves were well decorated and fairly believable. Their hint system was also a unique one as well that is based around a cell phone. We did run into a little hiccup with this as our group progressed through the rooms too quickly without solving all the puzzles in each room, and again, without spoiling anything, we lost our hint system. We ended up not being able to complete this room in time but the staff kindly allowed us to figure out the two puzzles we had been working on and completed the room anyways. They were great to us and seemed really excited and eager to hear our feedback which is always great. Even with the few hiccups we had, I still had a great time with this room and it’s a great start for Cognito. I really look forward to seeing what they come up with next.