Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Played this at a dinner party last night. A simply fantastic game, a bit like SpaceTeam but with much more depth and difficulty. You play the part of someone who is presented with a time bomb that you have to defuse by solving a number of puzzles on the device. Other (real life) friends in the room can’t see the bomb but instead have a giant manual of instructions that they can refer to. The puzzles are a real challenge and you gradually learn how to become competent at each type. This video gives a good idea of how it works. (Note that they absolutely nail it here and the game actually starts off a whole lot easier than this.)

You can play on a laptop but we used a Google Daydream headset along with their Pixel phone; my first experience of ‘proper’ virtual reality. It was incredible and extremely addictive — I really wanted to explore the environment and wander around the room the game put us in. It was weird to see the controller in my hand in the game itself (it would move and rotate exactly mirroring what I was doing with it in real life) as well as the swivel chair I was ‘virtually’ sitting on moving as I rotated my body around. When I took the headset off I felt very disoriented and I can see why they don’t want children under the age of 13 using them.