Overprotected By My Tsundere CEO-Chapter 544 - 336: Hit Variety Show Secured, Viral Praise Across the Internet [Part 2]
The first episode of the first season of "Escape Room" premiered at eight o’clock in the evening, meeting the eagerly awaiting audience.
Four regular guests were fixed, with two special guests for the first episode: a school flower, Rosa Sullivan, and a newly debuted boy band singer.
The highlights of the first episode were initially centered on the regular guests, with plenty of comedic elements to observe. Regarding Rosa Sullivan and the male singer, the attitude was merely hoping they wouldn’t hold back everyone else.
Unexpectedly—
Ultimately, the highlights of the show were snatched by the mechanism setting, occupying half of the attention, with Rosa Sullivan taking up most of the remaining half.
The theme of the Horror Hospital told the story of a "medical violence" incident.
A patient diagnosed with a terminal illness had antisocial personality disorder. On one night during hospitalization, he brutally murdered his attending physician and simultaneously killed all the nurses and patients on an entire floor. Afterwards, he jumped off the building, committing suicide.
This is the general storyline.
During the presentation, six guests were brought to a hospital ward, which was set to be the one the "murderer" had once stayed in.
The lighting was arranged dimly to create a terrifying atmosphere.
In the ward, information about the "murderer’s" identity was present, and the guests needed to gather this information to deduce the answer to escape from the ward.
However—
Perhaps it was their first time participating in this show, and the guests hadn’t gotten into the groove yet. Just searching for these basic pieces of information took them two hours, and they hadn’t completed the search.
They were trapped in the ward.
Afterwards, Rosa Sullivan, with incomplete information, directly abandoned reasoning and focused on the mechanism set at the door. Using principles to destroy it, she chose an alternative path to open the door and let them out of the ward.
Upon seeing this, the netizens flooded the comments—
[Wow, the girl is amazing!]
[I believe she’s a descendant of Mechanical Techniques now! So awesome! Isn’t she an arts student? These things should belong to engineering students, right?!]
[Amazing, amazing, amazing!]
[She’s so cool! My brother had an expression of pure admiration, haha.]
[Two hours ago—Program team: Just want to play you to death. Two hours later—Program team: Can also play like this?]
[Mom, I want to learn Mechanical Techniques!]
[Is it too late to learn Mechanical Techniques now?]
[Can universities offer a specialized major in Mechanical Techniques? Not mechanical engineering, just the kind of Ancient Mechanism Technique!]
...
A pile of praise and compliments, netizens clamoring to kneel before the girl.
After this—
Unlocking the corridor scene.
To leave the corridor, they could only go through the staircase, but an iron door was locked, requiring them to find a key.
The key could only be obtained by decrypting the rest of the rooms on that floor one by one.
In the subsequent process, the guests unlocked two rooms, one was a ward, and the other was the attending physician’s room, both based on key information from the rooms that hinted at the basic details of the characters who had stayed there.
The more thrilling setup was—
Once they leave a room, the character who once stayed in that room would revive.
For example, if they leave the ward, the "murderer" will revive as an NPC, wandering the corridor with a bloody knife. His appearances have a pattern, and the guests must hide in a room when he appears; if caught, they’ll be "killed."
The guests have five chances to revive, but if these five chances are used up, they can no longer participate in the game.
Later, when they unlock the child’s ward, it’s similar—
The child was only seven years old, smothered by the "murderer." Before being smothered, he held a doll.
His setup is that every half hour, he appears holding the doll. In his hand is a slingshot using candy as ammunition, and if he shoots a guest, the guest dies on the spot.
Each time he appears, he has three candies, and his appearance lasts three minutes.
As for reaching the attending physician’s office—
The episode ends there.
This thrilling, exciting, brain-challenging program naturally becomes a blockbuster due to its strong capability.
The program team originally bought several trending searches, such as:
#Escape Room#
#Rosa Sullivan#
#Mechanical Techniques#
#Medical Violence#
...
A few standard trending searches.
Unexpectedly, these trending searches quickly got overshadowed, while related trending searches about the program emerged wildly.
#Screaming New Variety Show# 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮
#Godlike Opening of Escape Room#
#Begging Miss Sullivan to Debut tonight#
#Mechanical Techniques Major#
#The Slingshot Boy#
#Did It Scare You?#
...
In recent years, variety shows have sprung up one after another, and netizens have become particularly picky. Even facing the popular variety show "Searching for the City’s Secret", opinions are mixed. People criticize when needed, mock when needed, and after each episode, debates break out on Zhihu and forums.
Surprisingly, this time the comments were unexpectedly unanimous—
[Awesome!]
[Totally blown away!]
[One episode, instant classic!]
[Just praise it!]
...
Half an hour after the show aired, it dominated several trending topics, and after the full broadcast, netizens began opening threads for discussion on major forums.
Such as:
"Summarizing the details of the first episode of "Escape Room", dissecting the entire story arc"
"Did you watch the first episode of "Escape Room"? Can anyone knowledgeable come out and explain if the mechanical techniques used are hardcore?"
"I’m amazed! Throughout "Escape Room", all the setups used Ancient Mechanism Technique without any modern methods! Truly authentic ancient techniques!"
"How to evaluate the first episode of "Escape Room"?"
"What’s your take on Rosa Sullivan’s performance in the first episode of "Escape Room"?"
"Any mechanical engineering students, please analyze the mechanism setups in "Escape Room", they look awesome!"
...
Netizens—
[The plot is brain-teasing, the ancient mechanisms are novel, the NPCs are amazing, and the guests are all great. Overall, it’s exhilarating, best of the year!]
[The guest setup is fantastic! Those who don’t think are hilarious and can lighten the mood; those who think connect clues and deduce storylines with top-notch logic skills; those neither funny nor thinking have great observation skills, finding evidence seamlessly... The most impressive part is, even if they hit a dead end, Rosa Sullivan acts as a cheat, bypassing all clues and reasoning to crack the room!]
[I couldn’t stay calm the whole time, just got a smack from my mom. It was either screams of excitement or laughter. Thrills are thrilling, humor is genuinely funny. Oh, and it’s truly brain-teasing.]
[The production team is amazing! So totally blown away! They actually gave the guests ’5 chances to die’, it’s so interesting.]
[If you want "escape", they have escape. If you want "room", they have rooms. The guests screamed so much in several places that they didn’t even edit out the sound of them cursing the production team, hahaha.]
[Seeing Rosa Sullivan unlocking, I was stunned; seeing the ’killer’ NPC appear with a knife, I was stunned; seeing the first unlucky guest ’killed’, I was stunned... What kind of divine treasure production team is this? Planners, hurry and come out for praise! I could praise you until your legs go weak!]
[Rosa Sullivan unlocking was simply brilliant, taking the atmosphere to a climax. If it weren’t for the behind-the-scenes showing the shocked expressions of the production team and director, I’d really believe this was character set-up, all scripted.]
[After "City Secret", this is another variety show worth following. I have a feeling this show will become legendary this year.]
...
Unified praise, unanimous recognition.
Even the guests benefited.
A few hours after airing, Rosa Sullivan’s Weibo followers surged past a million, while the other guests saw tens of thousands of new followers. Their names appeared in different ways on Weibo’s trending list, the exposure was frighteningly high.
*
Cloudwater Haven.
Nora Scott calmly watched the first episode.
She wrote the story;
She set up the NPCs;
She arranged the mechanisms;
...
Naturally, the whole process didn’t stir any emotions.
In her eyes, this episode, which could have scored ten, only got eight. They were stuck in the ward too long, the guests clearly hadn’t gotten into the groove then.
As for Rosa Sullivan using the principles of mechanisms to unlock...
If Nora didn’t know Rosa Sullivan’s background, she might be a bit surprised, but she knew before watching that Rosa had some foundation... so there was no surprise at all when she saw it.
The mechanical lock she took two minutes to set up had taken her much longer to study, clearly showing her basic skills weren’t firmly grounded.
The phone kept vibrating.
[Dubois]: Nora, I bow to you. The director was just lamenting in the group chat why didn’t we have you work on the planning for the later episodes.
[Dubois]: God Z is truly impressive, instantly outshining all the show’s writers.
[Dubois]: [Crying][Crying] Honestly, if I’d known sooner you were God Z, I would’ve clung to you like glue, there’s no way you’d only handle two episodes.
[Dubois]: We could have tripled your pay.
...
Dubois was the friend who contacted Nora to participate in designing the escape room for "Escape Room".
More accurately, a former classmate at Capital Tech.
Unlike Nora, Dubois smoothly graduated, top of the class, winning scholarships every year, an outstanding graduate.
Dubois’s side gig was as a video creator, making videos about mechanical works, which gained a substantial following.
Knowing Nora excelled in mechanical techniques, Dubois would seek her help when encountering difficult problems.
This time, during the escape room design for "Escape Room", Dubois was involved, and since several versions were unsatisfactory, received permission from the executive producer to enlist outside help—hence contacting Nora.
[Dubois]: We still have a few episodes without confirmed guest stars, the director wants me to ask if you’re interested in playing in "Escape Room"?
