The following is a review of The Box’s The Diamond Heist. It may contain minor spoilers around progression and puzzle themes.
I’m part of a team of six hackers trying to steal some very rare and valuable diamonds from the Van Steen conglomerate’s headquarters. Our man on the inside, Bob Ramirez, is currently helping us find the clues we need to unlock Van Steen’s CEO’s computer by examining a wedding band. Suddenly the ring slips from his fingers and clatters to the floor. “Sorry!” Bob exclaims. “I dropped it. Sorry.” Quickly he grabs the camera and moves to look under the desk where he’d been sitting. In the process, we catch a glimpse of something bolted to the underside that might be just as important.
Created by French company The Box, The Diamond Heist is a 75-minute escape room for 2-6 players, and hosted over Zoom. While the room is playable in-person at the company’s physical location in Metz, France, the online adaptation is a highlight due to the avatar interactions. The general premise is that players are contractors hired by a hacker collective called Chanonymous to help them steal from the Van Steen diamond conglomerate by assisting the skilled but not-terribly-sharp plant in Van Steen’s security personnel. Players have to guide the plant, Bob Ramirez, through a series of locks and puzzles in order to gain access to the Van Steen CEO’s office and private collection, rob him blind, and escape before the authorities arrive. In addition to the physical room, The Diamond Heist includes some online elements that make a second device or multiple monitors ideal: a Google Drive-based inventory system and several room-specific websites that add flavor, and also play an important role in several in-room puzzles.
The Diamond Heist’s setting and premise are drawn heavily from the real world; Van Steen is most likely a nod to De Beers, and the Chanonymous collective is a cat-themed version of the real-world Anonymous group. In fact, it’s literally a portmanteau of the group’s name and the French word for cat, and the introductory video from a Chanonymous member takes strong cues from some clips the real collective has released – with a bit of added feline flair. These and other winking references are fun Easter eggs for those who catch them and, along with the performance from avatar Bob Ramirez (played by The Box’s Game Master Lucas), inject some humor into the experience. In fact, Bob is one of The Diamond Heist’s highlights; Lucas’s portrayal of Bob as a bumbling savant helps explain why he needs our help, and he is just plain fun to watch.
The set design and construction in The Diamond Heist is solid on the whole, staying consistent with the corporate theme and hiding clues in the sort of seemingly-random bits of art and knick-knacks one might expect someone to keep in their office. This consistency and commitment to the narrative also manifests in the digital elements. The fake Van Steen website is basic, but it feels appropriate and the inclusion of a working chatbot is a nice touch. Meanwhile, the code-breaking tool players have access to has a more pixelated aesthetic that feels like it came out of the film Hackers. In fact, it’s pretty clear that a good deal of thought went into the design of the experience.
Unfortunately, there are a couple places where The Diamond Heist stumbles. The first is the inventory management system. Like several other rooms, including Improbable Escapes’ Neverland Heist on the High Seas, players are given access to photos of the puzzles they’ve unlocked to help save time and make things easier. But in The Diamond Heist’s case it feels like making things fit the narrative was taken a little too far. The photos are all loaded into one Google Drive folder, which can make things feel a little disorganized, where it wouldn’t have been too much trouble to have subfolders for each puzzle. Similarly, rather than take the more common approach of feeding players a password to unlock the next set of pictures, the team instead has to pause and wait for Bob to “upload” them – again, this makes narrative sense, but it results in frequently breaking the flow of the game.
The bigger issue concerns one of The Diamond Heist’s later challenges, where the team has to coach Bob through unlocking a number of safes that contain rare and valuable jewels. The first problem is that there are sixteen of these safes, which are all opened in basically the same fashion. Even the best puzzles get old with repetition, and doing the same task so many times is excessive. The second is that the tool players use to figure out the safe combinations is clunky. Looking up the references for each of the four stages resets whatever information players had previously keyed in, forcing them to start over if they get to the third or fourth step and need a reminder of the math they need to do. To be fair, both of these issues are solvable. Rather than asking teams to open all the safes, having a lead-in puzzle that narrows things down to, say, four of the sixteen would probably help. And reworking the code-breaker tool so that the references for each of the four steps can be consulted without clearing the progress on any prior steps would save a lot of aggravation.
In the absence of these issues, The Diamond Heist is worthwhile for those who place a premium on storytelling and acting. Admittedly the storytelling and avatar’s performance are stronger than the puzzle design, and it would have been wonderful to see the same level of creativity and forethought applied to the latter. What The Diamond Heist brings to the table is a cool concept, rich world-building, and some clever jokes and references that would offset some of its weaker points if the big issues were addressed.
To learn more about The Box or book one of their rooms, you can head over to their website here. You can also connect with them on social media through Facebook and Instagram. Check out our Remote Guide for other events you can enjoy in the safety of your own home.
