Johor Bahru, Aug 2024
All the escape venues in JB seem to be a half hour taxi ride away from the central station, and by the time we booked many of the options were booked up for Friday evening. Enigma Escape had availability, and we picked their non-horror option. All three of their rooms involve an acting element, though with Tangshan Prison that’s really just a short interval at the beginning, as a prelude to the game; that might actually have been the highlight of the game for me, though that was because we were entertaining ourselves improvising our roles more than anything the official actor did.
Naturally we needed to escape from prison – although the twist was that we’d got ourselves imprisoned intentionally, so as to investigate and expose the corrupt warden. And the game made a good first impression, not only with the acting intro but also with the atmospheric first room.
Curiously, it managed to be both sprawling and atmospheric on one hand, but also rather low budget and rough at the edges on the other. Dim lighting did a lot of the work for the set dressing; after a while we started to notice that we’d seen the same type of Ikea desk in the previous room, and in the one before that, and that there wasn’t a whole lot else in the room to look at.
The puzzles were also a mixed bag. Many were fine. They mostly tended to use the setting and theme without making sense within the setting in an immersive way, but that’s not a problem if you apply a little suspension of disbelief. A few struck me as needing fine-tuning, for example in being confusing how to enter our solution using the controls provided, or not giving much feedback to indicate that we’d solved something. A large puzzle right near the end was an example of that, which is probably why our host began pre-emptively talking us through what we needed to do over the walkie-talkie, even though we had in fact already solved half of it. It also had a flat ending, when a door swung unceremoniously open to reveal the venue corridor; and the staff struck me as a little disengaged.
All those criticisms aside, it was mostly a solid enough prison escape. We finished quickly, in about 35 minutes, but that involved progress through quite a number of different areas, and while they didn’t entirely stand up to close inspection, the game area tended to give at least a good impression. It was a slightly too brief burst of puzzling, but entertaining enough. 
