Escape Barcelona: Cybercity 2049

After so many genuinely first-rate games in and around Barcelona, it’s hard to find the words to do Cybercity justice. But let’s try anyway: it’s a sprawling extravaganza of an experience that’s relentlessly impressive and original, one of a tiny handful of games that pushes the bounds of what you might ever have thought reasonable to expect from an escape room.

Plot and setting take inspiration from The Matrix, along with Blade Runner and Terminator, and while your entrance into Cybercity might not be quite as much of a jolt as Neo got after taking his red pill, this rabbit hole goes a long way down. It’s hard to generalise about the game because there’s just so much of it, one scene after another, shifting between different styles of setting and puzzle while bringing you deeper into the world. It’s always impressive when a set leaves you disorientated, with no sense of how it’s laid out or how it could fit into whatever building it was built in; and Cybercity is like stepping into a different world.

The variety is remarkable; you could almost split it into multiple different games which would each stand alone perfectly well, while still forming a cohesive story. There are also elements of action and interaction involved, which might sound off putting to some players; where other games have used similar mechanics I haven’t always liked them. Here I thought they were great: because they were designed well, because they were only smallish parts of a much larger game, and because they allowed players leeway in how much to engage with them.

Cybercity excels across the board – which isn’t just hyperbole from me, in the 2021 Escape Room Awards in Spain it was nominated in almost every category. But for me the moment that stood out above all was when I realised that there was additional content, purely for world-building and as a hilarious Easter egg. I very much recommend taking your time to explore and try things even if they don’t seem like the option that’s going to move you closer to the end.

If by some tragic restriction of circumstance you can only play one of Barcelona’s many superb games – it should be this one. I very rarely give a 5 star rating to any game, but quite a few on this Barcelona trip earned it, and of those Cybercity without doubt took the top spot.