Naples, Jul 2023
We were standing lost in a dark street corner of Naples, looking round for the right address, when a door opened and a man stage-whispered at us: ppsst! escape room? Which to be honest is an excellent way for a game to start.
The story was something time travel something something magic idol something so you need to find it before the Nazis return in an hour; in other words, time to get our best Indiana Jones on.
I like this sort of lost temple theming; it does tend to come with a couple of tropes I’m less keen on though, such as the journal of clues. That was a feature of this game, though in a pretty unobjectionable way; it also starts you in darkness, and you need to find/solve something to get the lights on. On the other hand, once we’d done that the light level was pretty good for the rest, which is far preferable to having dim lights the whole way through.
This is a surprisingly non-linear room. In fact, I’d describe it as built around one big puzzle, at the climax of the game, which needs you to have solved all the other riddles to assemble what you need for it. That worked well with the theme, and I liked the way it gave a sense of increasing understanding of the symbols and objects around you – Dr Jones is an archaeologist, after all.
It’s a fairly small room, and in general it showed some signs of wear and tear, but crucially all the mechanisms worked as intended. Our host was also pleasingly restrained, giving hints on the walkie talkie only when we asked for them, and using an audio effect at one point as a subtler way to get us unstuck, by nudging us towards a particular area of the room.
I felt the flow was a little bumpy, due to the nature of a couple of the puzzles and some of the signposting; but there were no glaring problems, and the finish was genuinely cool, with a proper Indiana Jones vibe; that plus friendly and skilled hosting made this an enjoyable temple adventure. 
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