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Having run Break This Game, I also ran this one with my friends last week. I think BtG is the better of the two, but that's not surprising because the author had more experience when they wrote it!

Where BtG is delightfully sandbox-like while still evolving over time, this room presents basically all of its interactables right at the very start, which was a little overwhelming - both in terms of the time taken to interact with everything, and the memory overhead of remembering information and things to go back to.

Nonetheless, the room does a good job with its premise, without being too obtuse or pushing the "suspension of disbelief" (if you allow yourself to beileve in a world that happens to be full of puzzles) too far. It's a fun setting that is exploited well - for example, my players enjoyed the spatial reasoning of figuring out the central puzzle, and then how to get the pieces needed to solve it. The least "believable" part was the motivation of "getting to work on time", rather than having fun meddling with the observatory (and maybe robbing them a little as payback for locking the players in.)

Oh! And there's one visual puzzle that deserves a special shout out, because it leads to a delightful 'aha' moment. Even if it does, admittedly, only make sense if you think about it exactly the right amount, and don't worry about the whole 'suspension of disbelief' thing I mentioned, which honestly doesn't matter anyway :-P

Thanks for the review! Glad you and your friends enjoyed both rooms. This room definitely was the more "traditional" escape room of the two, falling well within the logic of a physical escape rooms (including the somewhat contrived story arc and puzzle rationales), with my other room pushing the bounds of the medium further. The visual puzzle near the end you referenced was a favorite of mine as well.