'Hey! Listen!' Legend of Zelda escape room gets Vancouver fans playing classic game in new way
Players at Thursday’s game solved a variety of puzzles and tasks with a Zelda theme to win the game
A hotel ballroom in Vancouver has been transformed into the mystical world of Hyrule.
Real Escape Games has turned the room at the Pinnacle Hotel into an "escape room" with a Legend of Zelda theme.
Escape rooms are games where players try to escape from a room by solving puzzles, completing objectives and finding clues.
Izzy Aslam, the game's master of ceremonies, said the focus on puzzles made Zelda a natural fit for an escape game tie-in.
"Legend of Zelda is a frustratingly troublesome puzzle adventure. You get thrown into dungeons. You get to solve puzzles oriented towards saving this land of Hyrule.
"[Players] really come in and play the video game. There's going to be a lot of familiar faces, familiar lore."
About 100 players came to the first Vancouver edition of the travelling game, which has made stops in other Canadian cities, among them local university student Naomi Lapurga.
"It's a video game that's cool, and it's real life," she said. "I like adventuring, breaking pots, going into dungeons."
Her friend, Alex Pertoia, has been playing Zelda games, he estimates, since he was three or four years old.
"I started with the [1986] Zelda and I've played almost all of them ever since there," he said. "I'm here to kill Ganondorf and save the princess. What else would you do in the Zelda escape game?"
Players at Thursday's opening event solved a variety of puzzles and tasks with a Zelda theme to win the game.
They even got to throw pots — in a way. They were, in fact, bean bags with pots printed on them.
In the end, teams got to complete the most vaunted of all Zelda tasks: finding the Master Sword, a recurring weapon in the game with enough magic powers to defeat Link's archnemesis, Ganondorf.
The Zelda escape room runs in Vancouver throughout the weekend. Tickets are available online.
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