I finally got around to watching that Death Stranding teaser that came out last week at the Game Awards – it looks so good!

Besides that, there’s a new gameplay trailer for Mass Effect: Andromeda. I can’t wait for this – there’s just so much about the Mass Effect world and games that I love, and this looks like so much fun!

I backed this about 2.5 years ago on Kickstarter and now we finally have a trailer and a release date: June 2016!

I’m not a huge Pokemon fan, but I enjoyed the early games and this upcoming version looks pretty amazing:

Can’t wait till this comes out!

I’ve gotten completely addicted to escape rooms this year. The idea is simple: your team gets locked inside a themed room filled with hidden objects, puzzles and various other things, and you need to escape the room in 60 minutes by solving all the clues. It’s pretty much the real life version of those flash games from the 90s.

There are at least 8 escape room companies now in London alone, providing 15 rooms all together, each themed and setup in a completely unique way. I was curious though? How do these rooms compare to each other? So I’ve decided to take on the bothersome task of trying out all these rooms with the same team, and reviewing them here!

The first room our team got to do was Escape Land, organized by Escape Games London. I got kindly invited by Sandor from Escape Games to review their room, so on a gloomy Thursday our group made our way to Bethnal Green to get locked in.

★★☆☆☆ Story

The story behind this room is that your group got sucked into a time tunnel and end up in the home of two steampunk scientists. You need to escape the room before the rest of their Illuminati friends arrive. This is all explained on their website, but when we got to the place there wasn’t really an intro to set the scene of the story.

The story element doesn’t get much better when you enter the room. Throughout the room there were several letters involving clues and puzzles, but not much to build the story of why you are there and why you need to escape.

★★☆☆☆ Atmosphere & Set Design

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh here, but compared to some of the other rooms I’ve done, the atmosphere of the room could have been better. The room is decorated with a desk, a set of drawers and two creepy mannequins that all look steampunky, and the walls are covered with various steampunk puzzle elements. But it doesn’t look polished or coherent enough; it doesn’t feel like you’ve just walked into the home of two steampunk scientists.

Now I wasn’t sure whether to mention this here or in the next section about puzzle design (bit of an in-between area, I guess), but all the locks were actual locks. Some used keys, some used code combinations, but they were all still I-can-buy-these-from-Amazon-style locks. Which also meant that the result of each puzzle was either a key or a number code. With the steampunk theme I was hoping for some more interesting contraptions, like using cogs or hidden switches to open wall compartments or doors.

★★★☆☆ Difficulty & Puzzle Design

While the locks themselves didn’t feel very steampunk, the puzzles certainly did make use of the steampunk theme, using pipes, cogs, vials and more. There was a good selection of different types of puzzles; some logical, some physical, some mechanical. Our host boasted that with their 16 puzzles, they had more than any other escape room.

This also meant that since we were with 5 people, all of us were constantly busy working on some puzzle. I liked that there were several puzzles which needed at least 2 people, meaning you really had to work together to solve it. We all had our own brilliant aha-moments, where we each finally figured out something.

I don’t want to go into spoiler-area detail of any of the puzzles, but I did enjoy the ones that I solved. As I said in the previous section, my only disappointment was that the result of every puzzle was a key or a number code. This also meant that if you had figured 2 out of the 3 clues/digits of a number code, you could easily brute-force the solution for the last digit.

In the end, we managed to escape the room in 39:08 minutes. I don’t know what the current standing record is, but it sounded like we had set a pretty fast time.

I really enjoyed escaping from the Escape Land room. It’s not as polished or immersive as some of the other rooms, but I think the puzzles are entertaining and fun to work on. It’s a great way to spend an evening with a group of friends!

Disclaimer: I got invited by Escape Rooms London to review their room. All thoughts and opinions are my own though.

It’s always fun seeing what is announced during E3: I can’t wait for some of these games to come out! I’ve haven’t had a proper I’m-so-addicted-to-this-game-I-don’t-want-to-do-anything-else stint for ages, but these trailers make me want to put a weekend aside for purely gaming.

I’ve chosen the trailers that I’m looking forward to the most here. What’s your favourite?

The Division

This looks great:

Assassin’s Creed Unity

I’m still playing Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, and it’s miles better than AC3. This next one is set in Paris and looks great… when was the Eiffel tower built? I’m still hoping they’ll do a London based one (my guess is a Victorian based one eventually).

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

I finally got around to playing Uncharted 1 and 2, but I still haven’t even started Uncharted 3 yet. Even though this is just a teaser, it really makes me want to go back to the series.

Rise of The Tomb Raider

I enjoyed the previous reboot Tomb Raider. It wasn’t a perfect Tomb Raider (not enough smart puzzles I found), but it’s interesting to see what they do next.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection

So awesome. The Master Chief collection will be on an all-in-one disc for Xbox One and contains the full campaigns and multiplayer for Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4. I’ve only ever played Halo: Combat Evolved, and have been waiting for a remastered version of Halo 2 ever since. Finally!

This looks awesome! I can’t wait to see how they end this all.

I still haven’t finished the inbetweeny not-that-original Batman: Origins, but hey, you get to be Batman again and who doesn’t like that?

I ordered these Mass Effect earrings last week and they look great! On the one side you have the Paragon symbol, on the other the Renegade. It’s the geek version of having an angel and devil on your shoulder.

I love having earrings with two different designs, even though most people don’t even notice it. These are now the third in my collection (the others: @ & # and two space invaders), but I’m looking for more; any ideas?

You can get these earrings from Sanshee.com for only $15.99.

The last few days have been blissfully relaxing: I’m currently on holiday in Croatia and most of my time has been spent on sitting next to the pool to swim, sunbathe and read. I wish I had a proper geeky swimsuit though!

For ages I’ve been eyeing Black Milk’s geeky swimsuit designs, but nothing really popped out as a must-have to me. They’ve had some cool Lord of The Rings and Star Wars designs in the past, but I’m not a massive enough fan of either of those to spend $100 on a swimsuit. They’ve now just launched a Mass Effect line… and I really want their N7 swimsuit!

Next to that N7 swimsuit, I’m also loving this cool Tali swimsuit:

The above two designs also come as leggings and dresses, and there are also three other Mass Effect (comic) designs. I wish they had added some of the other artwork; I would have loved to have seen a swimsuit with Garrus or the Normandy on it!

If you’ve read some of my posts the past few weeks, you’ll know I’ve been hoping to get my hands on the new Tomb Raider game. Well, now thanks to Ladbrokes I got the chance to play the game. Besides that as part of their promotion of their own Tomb Raider Slot Game they’ve given me a copy to giveaway to one of my lovely readers!

What do you need to do to enter? Simply fill in the following form:

You’ll also get an extra entry if you mention the giveaway on Twitter with the hashtag #missgeeky, and another extra entry if you like this post on Facebook. The competition is only open to residents in the UK. The winner will be drawn randomly and I will contact them on Tuesday April 3rd.

So what did I think of the game? Short version: fun yet brutal game that somehow doesn’t feel like “my” Tomb Raider.

I used to be a huge Tomb Raider fan. It had a strong kickass female protagonist, featured lots of spooky ancient places and the main gameplay was focused on solving puzzles. I wasn’t very good at it, but it was fun and the part of me that loved ancient history enjoyed seeing the myths and tombs come to life. I could walk around the ruins of an ancient Indian temple or explore the catacombs of a Egyptian temple and it filled me with awe and wonder. I loved how you could pull a random lever, hear a click and not know what the effect was, leaving you wandering around trying to find what had changed. I loved how you had to battle dinosaurs, mutants, gods, and other weird things that inhabited those ancient tombs.

Jump forward 16 years (!!! wow, now I feel old) and we get the rebooted version featuring a younger more innocent Lara Croft. This new story is all about putting this unexperienced Lara into a deadly dangerous environment and seeing her “grow” into the Lara Croft we know. She’s thrown into this terrible situation and does everything she can to make sure she and her friends survive.

As I expected there’s a lot about this game that feels like Uncharted: ancient ruins, phases of corridors of enemies just shooting at you and the standard jumping and climbing traversals. Once you unlock your special rope arrow ability (also: who the hell went through all the effort of tying ropes around all those bits of trees, doors and pillars?? Someone on that island must have been bored) the game traversal gets a bit more interesting and the use of fire provides some fun puzzle solving.

The problem I had with those “puzzles” though is that they never felt too complex; every single time it was pretty straightforward on how to solve it, I never had the feeling the game was challenging me. I can understand that the main storyline should remain easy and solvable for all, but why couldn’t some of the optional tombs be a bit more trickier? Why couldn’t they bring back the levers, hiding some of the challenges behind secret doors?

Next to that I was missing that awe and wonder I had with the older games. The graphics are way better now, so I was expecting to be blown away by awesome and awe-inspiring ancient ruins. Instead the creators went down the shock and horror route. The game is full of impaled corpses, bloody altars, chunks of unidentifiable slabs of meat hanging off hooks, and piles of skulls and bones. The environment feels bland and brutal, and I felt uneasy the entire time playing.

What it comes down to is that to me the game didn’t feel like the Tomb Raider I grew up with and loved. I wanted a game that makes me feel like I’m a kickass archaeologist, solving tricky puzzles, exploring gorgeous abandoned tombs and discovering awesome artefacts. Instead this Tomb Raider is all about surviving: surviving the harsh environment, surviving the brutal island inhabitants, surviving everything that is thrown at you. I get that that’s what they were going for, I just wish that besides all that surviving Lara had also learnt a sense of wonder and excitement for discovery.

By the end of the game, I don’t think Lara has turned into the Lara Croft of the previous games; instead they’ve rewritten her history so much, that she’s turned into this other unrecognizable Lara with a different personality and motivation, a Lara that I’m not sure I want to see more of. As much as I enjoyed playing the game, I miss “my” Lara and I miss the Tomb Raider of old.

This looks great:

I always thought I had played DuckTales as a kid on the NES, but turns out that was DuckTales 2. Which had pretty much the same gameplay as far as I can tell. I can’t wait to get my hands on this remastered version!