We have been told to bring a blindfold and headphones for a “terrifying sonic experience” on Zoom. There’s a trigger warning of its “adult content” by a faceless voice called Master, who tells us that emotions will run high over the next two hours – so we can remove the blindfolds and take a breather if we feel overwhelmed. Now the nerves really are jangling.

But they jangle in a good way in the course of this interactive digital drama, devised by Morpheus and produced by Yana Greene, who also adapted its script from the original in Russian. We, its participants, are its actors, says Master (Dominic McChesney), and everything will happen in our minds.

He guides us into imagining the story initially – a benign tale of a group of friends and a get-together before we have a car crash and wake up in a hospital ward to find that the world has changed: a deadly virus is on the loose and the government has been overthrown by the militia. A people’s army is out there, too. There are Big Brother-style Tannoy commands outside our building and blood-curdling screams from the infected or dying within.

If it sounds too close for comfort, it is not. In fact, it was created as physical theatre before the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic, in 2018, by Russian performers. The game was then transferred to Zoom.

Master gives us choices on how to build the story by deciding what steps to take next together. We meet guards and survivors along the way (all played by Simon Kingsley). The scenarios that build up are a cross between the dystopian drama of 28 Days Later and the epidemic mystery in José Saramago’s Blindness. It feels like edge-of-the-seat escapism, despite the real-life resonance of a deadly virus and a race to find a vaccine.

But the most exhilarating part of it is in the human connection and collective decision-making required for the game to work. The show allows up to six participants and is billed as the “perfect team-building experience for workplaces”. Blinded in our virtual world, we are certainly thinking and acting as a group. Communicating with these strangers feels oddly intimate in this sensory deprived setting and it is good fun, too, despite the gore and gunshots.

Stranded in our dystopia, we only have knick-knacks (a coffee mug, a KitKat, a ballpoint pen) and our wits to protect us from the dark forces that surround us. It is surprising self-knowledge to learn that before long, we are all ready to set elevators alight and cut up our enemies with scalpels.

I am given an adrenaline shot when I become weak at the knees, despite a shortage of the injection. A fellow adventurer sacrifices his portion of the KitKat, for the group; we have each others’ backs.

This group action feels good – a cuddlier version of the Hunger Games – though we are never tested against each other and it might have become a darker, edgier game if we were. It does, though, invite an oblique reflection on the welfare of the group in relation to individual survival, and on how to survive “ethically”, causing no harm to the collective – perhaps a lesson for our real-life pandemic situation.

There is the catharsis of a happy ending, too, for us at least. My comrades and I “made a lot of the right choices,” Master tells us at the end, and so we saved the world. We worked well as a group, he adds. Master is right and I would happily meet the gang again in another virtual hellhole, for one last big job.

• Tickets are available here.