FunEscape: Lost Girl

By | March 13, 2017

Warsaw, Mar 2017

Rated between 2 and 3 out of 5
Sam says:

This room started with great promise. After an interesting initial setup in the first room, I was very disappointed with the remainder.
They had gone for a dark room, which can be done very well; this wasn’t. At least two of the torches weren’t powered properly; and the one light that was activated both flickered (no epilepsy warning) and had to be continuously activated, meaning one of our team was stuck in a corner bored.
There weren’t many puzzles and the ones we did weren’t sophisticated; one of them was fundamentally flawed, requiring you to deduce a code for a box without sufficient instruction; and the one nice search was ruined by having too vast an area and detritus to search through.
I like rooms with good atmosphere, which this had; it might be good as a horror experience, but it has too many failings as an escape room. 2 / 5
Toby says:

It’s not uncommon for a room to start a team off blindfolded, handcuffed, or separated. I’ll avoid details for spoiler reasons, but Lost Girl did perhaps the best version of this I’ve yet seen.
The team plays by torchlight. Lost Girl is uncompromisingly dark and is out to frighten you, or at the very least get you nervous. The slasher horror house gore may be a little tongue-in-cheek, but the darkness, audio and effects do the trick – good luck getting through this game without being made to jump or startle just a little.
It also benefits from being set in a huge space, where you can genuinely find yourself separated from your teammates, on your own in the darkness with nothing but a flickering torch and grim remnants scattered amidst the cobwebs and broken masonry.
That’s what the game sets out to do, and it does it brilliantly. As an attempt at immersing you in a horror film script, it’s immensely successful, and if that’s your sort of thing then this is definitely a game you should check out.
Nonetheless, as a puzzle room it’s badly flawed. Given the big space, the minimal light and the quantity of decorations, the designers made the sensible choice to keep it light on the search requirements. However, they also made it far too light on puzzles generally. There aren’t many of them, and they’re mostly straightforward; and then one puzzle near the end is massively arbitrary. With a suitable clue it would be an okay puzzle, though a very standard one; as it is, I struggle to see how any teams could solve it without a hint to put them on the right track.
Without that flaw, I’d describe it as a poor puzzle game but an excellent horror experience. As it is, I’d hesitate to recommend it even to scare attractions fans without including a big caveat. 2 / 5
Lewis rated this:3 / 5

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