As noted yesterday, today was a Work Day Out. Not a Work Day Out where we had to do any work, but a Nice Thing To Do Together, presumably for the purposes of “team-building” and suchlike. I may sound cynical, but honestly my workplace is such a nice, small company that any occasion like this just feels like a nice gathering of friends — albeit one where the boss foots the bill. Winner.
Our main activity for the day was The Traitors Live Experience, an interactive group game based on the (apparently) popular TV show. (I’ve never seen it. But that doesn’t mean much these days.) I was a little concerned ahead of time that we might end up playing with strangers, but thankfully we had enough people in our group to ensure that our game, which had 11 people total (and could have supported up to 14) was entirely people who knew each other. While The Traitors TV show is based on the assumption that most of the participants won’t know one another prior to playing, they have a lot longer to get to know each other; as such, since The Traitors Live Experience is just shy of two hours in length, I suspect it is best played with people you have, at the very least, a passing acquaintance with.
I’m going to explain how the game works now on the assumption that you, like me, have never seen The Traitors, so if you’re a big fan of the show and you feel like I’m stating the obvious, I can only apologise. I am not able to comment on the experience from a fan’s perspective, so this will have to do you for now.
After an opportunity to hang out together in a comfortable bar area (with seating!) before your game starts, you are led into the depths of the venue, through a series of creepy Resident Evil mansion-style corridors, until you eventually reach your “Round Table” room. Once ensconced in your seat of choice, which you will stay in for the majority of the game, your host introduces the game and how it works.
Before play proper begins, at least one Traitor is selected. This unfolds through everyone seated at the table blindfolding themselves with blackout goggles, then loud music playing while the host stalks around the room and taps one or more people on the shoulder, indicating that they are the Traitors for the game. The remaining players are the Faithful.
The Traitors Live Experience unfolds in two parts: “day”-based missions and “night”-based potential betrayals. During the day, the group as a whole is given some sort of task to complete, and successfully achieving this rewards the group as a whole with “gold”. You don’t actually win any cash (unlike the TV show) — the “gold” is simply a score of sorts. At the end of the game, if all the Traitors have been eliminated, the Faithful score all the points, while if even one Traitor remains, the Traitors take all the points. The venue has daily leaderboards for how well Faithful and Traitors have performed.
At night, everyone dons their blackout goggles once more, but the Traitors are invited to take them off partway through proceedings. At this point, one of several things can happen: they can “murder” someone by pointing at them; they can “blackmail” a Faithful, causing them to become a Traitor (though I believe there are conditions on when this can occur, such as when a Traitor is eliminated from the game) or nothing at all can happen. Once again, if someone is “murdered”, the host silently taps them on the shoulder, and they remove themselves from the room before everyone else takes their goggles off.
Being murdered (or, in later rounds of the game, “banished” by the Faithful if they believe you are a Traitor) doesn’t mean your game is completely over; instead, you are removed to a separate room where you can watch live camera feeds of the surviving players, and at various junctures you are given the opportunity to interact with the games they are playing by solving puzzles in the other room, or perhaps by finding creative ways to communicate “from beyond the grave”, as it were. There was a nice vaguely “escape room” feel to this side of proceedings, helping even those who are eliminated early to feel involved in the complete game.
As it happens, I, a Faithful, was murdered quite early on due to my strong performance in one of the missions and making some solid observations during the pre-Banishment deliberations. I was worried that getting knocked out early would be boring and annoying, but actually it was rather fun, particularly once some other people joined me in the room and we had to discuss whether to help the survivors or actively sabotage their attempts.
The missions themselves are all pretty simple parlour game-style puzzles — I assume they have a bank of them available to randomise so that two games aren’t exactly alike. In our game, we initially had a straightforward puzzle where we had to rotate dials on the table to accurately depict the cycles of the moon. This was followed by a “spot the difference” game where we were showed a model of a crime scene and some photographs of a few details from it, then shortly after, we were shown a different model of the same crime scene (and “the same but potentially different” photographs) and tasked with spotting five changes, with bonus points on offer if we could determine how the corpse was actually murdered.
After that, we had a game where we were challenged to press a hidden button under the table after an exact amount of time had elapsed — this was the one I excelled at, since I’ve always been rather good at that sort of thing — and, after I’d been eliminated, the group were tasked with arranging a set of Tarot-like cards in order (with us “assisting” from beyond the grave by flashing the lights in the Round Table room from afar) and, as the grand finale, the group were challenged to recreate several scenes shown in silhouette by equipping themselves with props and standing in place.
I don’t know how close in execution the whole thing is to the TV show, but plenty of effort has been made with the presentation of everything. There’s plenty of cool lighting effects, dramatic music and suchlike, and the “Round Table room” is nicely detailed, even concealing a secret exit to “Traitors Tower”, where the finale sequence took place. The whole thing was very enjoyable, and I’m glad I overcame my initial misgivings about playing a game so based on social cues to enjoy the experience.
As I say, I feel like for certain types of people, the experience will lose some of its appeal if you attend in a small group and end up being paired up with strangers, but likewise some people will thrive in that environment. It’s good that the game is seemingly flexible and doesn’t force anyone to do anything they’re uncomfortable with — prior to starting the game, you’re given the opportunity to privately indicate if you’d rather not be a Traitor from the outset, though this doesn’t preclude you from potentially being “recruited” later in the game if the Traitors’ ranks find themselves thinning.
We followed our time at The Traitors Live Experience with a late lunch at The Ivy Market Grill, a posh and expensive restaurant on Covent Garden that lets you go “I had lunch at The Ivy” without having to actually go to the real Ivy in the West End or pay the astronomical prices required to become a member of The Ivy Club. I had a cheese souffle, a sirloin steak and a chocolate bombe for dessert. All of them were delicious and I am still stuffed even now, a good four hours after we finished eating. The diet has gone out the window for today, of course, but y’know what, it doesn’t matter. I had a good time, and I can be back on track tomorrow. It’s not as if I’m going to be eating like that every day, after all.
Anyway, all in all it was a very good day, and I’m glad I went along. I’m knackered now, though; on paper it might not sound like we did all that much, but when you take into account the train travel in both directions, add the walking required when progressing across London in various ways, add the energy required to keep your social batteries topped up for most of a day with the same group of people, it all adds up. So I’m back home now, writing this in my pants, feeling thoroughly satisfied. Probably an early night tonight, though.
Although Silent Hill f did arrive today, so…
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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