Review: The Underground Game Show is like family game night with a twist

The Attractions Magazine crew was recently invited out to The Bureau, not to try one of their escape rooms, but to play their all new experience, The Underground Game Show. While this isn’t a totally unique concept, it is the first we’ve seen in Central Florida. Does The Underground Game Show hit the jackpot or is it a whammy? Let’s take a spin and find out.

The Bureau is a local Orlando, Fla. escape room venue which is home to several highly rated escape experiences, all connected together by an over-arching story of agents traveling the multiverse. The Underground Game Show fits into the meta-story as the “training” experience for new agents to learn skills they would need on missions (i.e., the escape rooms). In practice, guests find themselves participating in a live game show complete with trivia questions, buzzers, physical challenges, and a smarmy host. 

The gameplay sees your group broken up into two teams and playing against each other in rounds of trivia and physical challenges. The teams alternate, choosing the trivia category for the round from options such as movies, books, science and theme parks. The difficulty of the questions range from simple “gimmes” to incredibly obscure and esoteric knowledge. (The most difficult category for us was, ironically, theme parks. As a group of people who do theme parks for a living, we found ourselves completely stumped an embarrassing number of times. We think they knew we were coming.) They do employ a fun mechanic of double points if you answered before the multiple choice options came up. We enjoyed this as it gave a risk/reward depending on how confident you felt when you saw the question.

In-between the trivia, we participated in physical challenges designed to break up the experience. In the story, each challenge represented something we might come across as a full agent working for The Bureau, though I think there was a missed opportunity to more directly connect each challenge to a specific escape room instead of just general agent skills. The challenges themselves were, unfortunately, a little underwhelming.

Where, in a similar experience, I felt I was living my game show fantasies spinning giant wheels and playing Plinko, many of these games felt more like party games I could play at home including pictionary (albeit blindfolded) and stacking nuts. We did enjoy ourselves playing the games and competing against each other (and ultimately, that’s the real point), but after the “wow” factors The Bureau puts into each of their escape rooms, I was honestly hoping for a little more here. We were also a little sad the game just kind of ends after a number of rounds of trivia and physical challenges. Final Jeopardy, the showcase showdown, and other special final rounds provide an exciting end to most game shows and would have been a great cap to our experience. 

As with any other live hosted experience, The Underground Game Show lives and dies on the abilities of the host. Our host did a good job matching our energy and keeping the experience moving forward, though he was plagued by a microphone that provided more distortion than amplification (The size of the room probably means he shouldn’t have needed it at all.) He had a tough job keeping everything moving, keeping us entertained, and running the effects in the room, but he did an admirable job.

In the end, as someone who experiences a lot of location based entertainment, I judge them all with one simple question: Could I have done this at home and had the same experience? And unfortunately, I think the answer here might be, “yes, pretty much.” Trivia and party games are standard fare for home get-togethers. It was a lot of fun playing trivia and games and laughing with my friends, but the experience lacked a certain amount of spectacle we’ve come to expect from a games show, and specifically from The Bureau’s offerings. Thinking of this as less of a game show and more of a hosted game night might set guests expectations more accurately. 

The Underground Game Show can accommodate two to 12 players. We brought nine and feel like the sweet spot would probably be four to six. We experienced a pre-opening, beta testing version of the game and had the opportunity to offer the above thoughts and suggestions to the creators of the game who listened eagerly and took notes, so likely some of these comments will be addressed over time. We were also told the game would operate in “seasons”, with trivia and challenges being changed out over time so guests who enjoyed it can come back and experience it again without a problem. The Underground Game Show is open now at The Bureau in Orlando Fla. For tickets or more information visit UndergroundGameShow.com.