Lana and three of her fellow office workers embark on a team-building exercise in an escape room called The Masked Ball. But as they progress, the rooms become smaller and the dark becomes darker - and they realise that the clues are highly personalised, revealing shameful secrets about each of them. What is this escape room - and will they ever get out…?
We Will Be Watching has a lot of potential in its premise - I was hoping it’d be a Kafka-esque nightmare, a more claustrophobic modern-day haunted house, a Saw-type deal, or contain more twists than it did - but Ruth Ware doesn’t do anything special with it. Even the things she sets up don’t really pay off - the characters are told that they mustn’t remove their masks for any reason, or else, so I thought something would happen when they did… and nothing happened.
Similarly, what was the point of letting each character know that whoever ran the escape room knew their secrets - who ran the escape room? Why are they doing this - what do they get out of it? We never find out, which is unsatisfying, nor do the characters really change with this new knowledge about themselves, and the story ends abruptly on nothing.
There’s a good story to be had with this promising setting but We Will Be Watching isn’t that. Seeing people solve banal puzzles isn’t interesting and if there aren’t consequences to any revelations then why should we care? Finding out the secrets of the characters was kinda compelling, as well as seeing them lose their nerve and slowly fall apart, and it’s not badly written, but it’s too underdeveloped and insubstantial for my blood.
(If you want to read this 49-page short story for free, sign up at Ruth Ware’s website and it’ll be emailed to you: https://ruthware.com/download-free-st...)
No comments:
Post a Comment