Solving the crime of the Century

I was pretty confident that this time, my team would be able to solve a mystery at Century City Mall's Mystery Manila. Yes, I was back with a vengeance because the last time I was here, my team hadn't retrieved the Pym Particle with time to spare. The team I was in, this time around, was composed of college degree holders, but I was the only one with a PhD. There's a lawyer and the rest had at least taken units towards their Masters... or had finished them. I was the only self-declared overthinker in the team... for a change.

(Don't rely on the PhD's to get you through this type of game. We always overthink; we can't separate real clues from red herrings.)

We attempted to solve the Crime of the Century. It's basically a hunt all over the mall.

When we started the game, the first thing I noticed was that my teammates just ran off without reading the materials given to us in their entirety. They just started hunting for clues! When we did start getting them, that's when they started to piece things together. I, on the other hand, was stuck on our first clue. What did it mean? Was I overthinking again?!?

An hour into our game, we were still stuck in Clue #1. Some were already thinking that we won't feel a sense of accomplishment because we won't solve the crime of the Century... and that's when we started looking more deeply at the rest of the documents given to us. By this time, we were all huddled at the foot of an escalator, poring through clues and struggling through technical difficulties.

But once we solved Clue #2, we were on a roll!

Back in the game, with 20 minutes to go, we were racing up the mall again, processing what the clues meant. And finally, the last pieces fell into place: we were facing the last of the puzzle, with 12 minutes on the clock. We were supposed to disarm a "bomb" using a number combination that can only be obtained from reading beyond what the clues meant. And we only had one chance to punch in the code... I felt we fell through a rabbit hole, straight into a MacGyver episode! 

"Bomb" defused with three minutes to go! Not as nerve-wracking as being George Clooney or Nicole Kidman in The Peacemaker. But still, we felt an adrenaline rush because we solved the crime of the Century in less than 90 minutes!!

We didn't make it to the leaderboard because we took 87 minutes to solve it. But we got bragging rights and a photo to prove that we did it!