By CHIN JIAN WEI

On June 21, we at BASKL celebrated our second anniversary. As we’re always looking for fun and interesting activities for our readers, we decided to give The Bomb Battle a try. Billed as a multiplayer real life video game experience, it combines inspirations from action movies, escape games, esports, and game shows to give visitors a unique and thrilling experience.

It is presented as a series of high-tech game challenges where players must score as many points as possible before time runs out. The points that they have collected will carry over and be converted into extra time for them to use in the final challenge, where they have to deactivate the “bomb”. If they fail to do so in time, everyone will be drenched in a vibrant deluge of neon paint. Don’t worry, you’ll be wearing a full-body Hazmat suit and face shield, so you’ll be spared from getting soaked to the skin.

On the difficulty level that we undertook (easy), there were four rooms before the final bomb room. The first room was a game of logic where we needed to connect dots on a grid without allowing any connecting lines to intersect. There were four screens in the room, and we had to divide our team of six so that we could complete the puzzle as quickly as possible. As an added twist, some of the dots were blocked off until our teammates, working on the other screens, connected them. This made for an additional level of complexity to the puzzle and required us to work together more closely.

The second room was wildly different. It was a room of laser tripwires exactly like the sort you see in spy movies. We needed to hold down several buttons, located at opposite ends of the room, simultaneously. The difficulty lay in navigating through the laser tripwires without touching them, as points would be deducted for touching them. It was so difficult to move without touching the lasers, so in the end, we decided the best course of action was to just roll under them. Our colleague Nabila says, “What surprised me most was that I (and everyone) could crawl and roll like that. When life gives you lasers, I guess all you have to do is slither the best you could to earn team points!” Fellow BASKL writer Danial adds, “It was very physical and exciting to avoid the lasers.” However, despite us “outsmarting” the system, we scored very poorly in this room. We’d like to blame it on the buttons which were rather unresponsive, but maybe our rolling technique just was not as foolproof as we thought. Plus, it was really exhausting.

After the unexpected workout in the second room, we moved on to the next challenge room, where we listened to a short melody. Then we had to recreate the exact same melody by pressing buttons on the wall that emitted musical notes. Despite the supposed artistic inclinations of the BASKL team, our performance in this room was by far the worst, scoring zero points as no matter how hard we tried, we were not able to recreate the melody. BASKL Editor, Shah says, “The difficult tasks of some of the challenges surprised me (case in point, I wasn’t expecting the melody challenge to be so tricky).” Perhaps we needed to approach the challenge more methodically.

The fourth room was a lot easier, as we needed to select the numbers in ascending order across four separate screens. This one mainly tested communications and efficient “call-outs”. All things considered, it was a lot simpler compared to the earlier rooms and was a much-needed boost to our wounded pride.

The final room was where we had to actually “defuse” the bomb. Here is where the points accumulated in previous rounds came into play, with a bonus to our time awarded based on how many points we scored. Without spoiling the final challenge, it once again involves careful teamwork and coordination. Alas, we were just a few seconds too slow in completing it, and we suffered the consequences: a full blast of neon paint. Despite the intimidation factor of having the paint cannons aimed at us, it was absolutely painless and we had fun dancing around while the UV lights illuminated our colourful suits.

Despite our ultimate loss, it was a fun experience, and one that rewarded teamwork between participants. If you’re a fan of game shows and have ever wished you could take part in those wacky activities, this could be the experience for you. Nabila says, “Pardon the cliche answer, but I like the way everyone came together as a team. There were different puzzles so we tried to make it work differently each time, on the spot, whatever it took (in most cases, losing a point or two). Everyone’s skill sets were tested and I can say that each person played their role well in each game. (Some instances might be funnier than others). For someone who went back with large paint spots on her clothes, I wished there was more paint. But again, what we tried was the beginner’s level, so maybe more paint is to be expected for the other levels? I would have to come back for that!”

Check Bomb Battle out on their Instagram page or their website!

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