Enroll At The Fastest Med School In The West: Dr. Botcher’s (Preview)
LA’s Two Bit Circus won’t tell anyone if you drink and surgerize
They were at the wrong place, at the wrong time. Naturally, they became unlicensed surgeons.
You’re a few hours and maybe a few drinks into your Saturday night when a man in a lab coat accosts you. He asks if you’ll be around in twenty minutes to help with some “testing.”
Next thing you know you’re conducting surgery on a patient with unearthly orange skin and very, very strange medical needs.
Just another Saturday night at Two Bit Circus, where the NoPro crew was bidding bon voyage to one of our own who was setting sail for Santa Fe. That’s when Eric Gradman, co-founder of of 2BC, invited us to test run Dr. Botcher’s Minute Medical School the circus’s newest story room experience. It was sheer luck for all of us, and I warned Gradman that he was inviting a tough room down to test out the game.
While there were still a few pieces of final polish that would be put in place when Dr. Botcher would make his public debut a few days later there’s no deny that the game is FUN. Yes, with the capitals and the bolds. Fast paced mayhem in a puppet universe the winks and nods at a classic kid’s board game while delivering the mad science vibe 2BC excels at. This is easily my favorite thing in the micro-amusement park already, and because of the clever way that the game assigns players roles that switch mid-game means that replayability is a real option.
This isn’t the only story room at 2BC, which has taken an approach to developing original “escape room” adjacent games that solve the biggest issue with the genre: that most of them can only one played once with any sense of challenge. Dr. Botcher’s subverts that problem through the role-switching and the fact that it’s really a suite of mini-games that combine technology and physical puzzles to make a complete experience.
The game is also fast, and while it feels complete in and of itself at around twenty minutes of play time, it’s not so long that you wouldn’t want to step up and play again the next time you’re at the park. That makes Dr. Botcher’s feel like the start of something for the not-quite-a-year-old park: a signature in-house attraction that would be the highlight of any, and potentially every, visit.
Dr. Botcher’s Minute Medical School is now playing at Two Bit Circus, 634 Mateo St., LA, for teams of 3–6 players, at $20–22 a person.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium web site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.
Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.
