This has been more of a travel and event review blog as of late, hasn’t it? I’ve went to Winter Weirdness, played some One Piece TCG, won some Magic. In between all of that, I’ve been doing a lot of work on Card City Critters, designing and drawing a whole bunch more cards!
Even with all of that done, Granite Game Summit is just about 2 weeks out, and PAX East is just a bit after that.
Oh, and yesterday, I went down to Natick to try out Level 99 for a friends birthday.
Level 99 is a giant collection of real world physical puzzles and minigames located in the Natick Mall.
One required running through a line of swinging axes like a real life version of Sens Fortress, while another involved sliding pucks up a giant pinball board to score points. Some are more physical, like a giant set of monkey bars that have to be climbed across while tapping buttons on a wall. One was a collection of riddles where names had to be matched to photos.
There’s also subset of head to head duel games. If you’ve ever seen one of those videos of people playing augmented reality pong on a rock wall, it might have been from Level 99. Most of the duels are a little less sophisticated, but there was a weird sort of a quidditch/dodgeball thing that I thought was quite clever.
There’s also a sort of art/scavenger hunt thing, but I didn’t find this bit super compelling. Fortunately, like most things at Level 99, you don’t have to spend time on things you don’t really want to do. Almost all the challenges are 2-5 minutes long, and if you come out of something disliking it, you can just move onto the next one.
In order to really explain what I appreciated about Level 99, I’m gonna have to be a bit of pessimist for a moment. Sorry.
Most branded arcades I’ve been to as an adult are actually not super fun. Funspot is an underwhelming tourist trap of often broken pinball tables. Most machines in a Dave and Busters are pretty much just slot machines for children.
Outside of things like lightguns and driving rigs, I’ve yet to encounter anything in these arcades that actually take advantage of their unique size and space to deliver something special in the gameplay department. And even said lightgun games are often underwhelming, mostly just reskinned rail shooters.
To avoid painting with a super wide brush, there are a lot of places I’ve gone to that I’ve enjoyed, like the Barcade in New York, or Capital Pinball. But these are often the exceptions, carefully cultivated little spaces, as opposed to the norm.
If you scale things up from your standard plug-and-play style machines, I different but honestly equally negative feeling about theme parks. I went to Universal Studios Florida a few years back, and while I remember being impressed by the production value, I felt like I was nickle and dimed from every angle, while also being asked to wait in long lines for 5 minutes of fun.
Level 99 was $60 per person for the whole day.
Nobody charged me to use a locker to store my bag and sweatshirt. Across the 7 hours I stayed, I saw maybe three games that were out of order. I saw two of the three fixed within an hour, one fixed with about 2 minutes of me mentioning to an employee that it wasn’t working. The longest I ever waited in line for anything was maybe 7 minutes, if even that.
I am just so used to these sorts of spaces being designed and priced by someone who traded in their soul for an MBA. By the sort of person who uses the word “value extraction” completely unironically.
It was just such a breath of fresh air to have a weird clever little gaming space that seemed to want you to show up, have a good time, and actually want to come back. Did they sell me a 12 ounce can of beer for 8 dollars? Yes, but that’s a small sacrifice to make for a space where all the games actually work, where all the lines are reasonable, and that costs me less then Battlefield 6.
Overall, it’s fantastic, and I would love to go again as soon as every part of my body stops aching.
A few final quick caveats or notes for anyone I might inspire to go to Level 99.
-Wear comfy shoes and pants! You are going to be moving around a lot.
-Level 99 isn’t really designed as a “kids first” space. A lot of these puzzles require people to be either fairly dexterous, or at given level of strength. A 6 or 7 year old would have a better time a normal playground built for their size.
-Likewise, I wouldn’t go alone. Most of these puzzles are team based, and require AT LEAST 2 people to work. Also it’s much more fun to duel your buddies.
-If you’re going on a busy day, you probably want to pre-register/order tickets in advance.
-If you can avoid it, don’t go on a busy day, go in the middle of a Thursday with no holiday/vacation/etc. The crowds never got bad, but they did get loud.