Escape Barcelona: Tomb Hunter: Akasha’s Legend

As escape rooms have evolved and become more sophisticated, I think it’s fair to say that in the whole they’ve shifted in emphasis from ‘puzzle challenge’ to ‘immerse experience’. The degree to which that’s true varies hugely between games, but Legend of Akasha really exemplifies that change.

We found that games in Barcelona were far more likely than U.K. ones to use a ‘cold open’, where you arrive on the dot and are immediately plunged into the game, with no lobby and with any briefing done in-character. Akasha follows this style, with a remarkably smooth transition from street to story.

Akasha is the First Vampire, long dormant but now threatening to wake; which would be bad news, particularly since you’re inside her ancient tomb. That premise could be an action movie, and this is an action movie of a game. You really feel like you’re exploring Indiana Jones style, with all the physicality that implies: climbing and scrambling and dealing with booby traps. (Wear clothes that you don’t mind getting dusty!)

It’s not short of puzzles either, and some of them had more subtlety than I appreciated at the time. One in particular we solved by trial and error, and when the intended solution was explained to us it required both good observation in a dark environment and also the right flash of insight. That might be too much of a stretch for most teams (it would have been for us!), but seemed set up such that the trial and error option was the ‘standard’ way to solve it, with the more difficult approach available for extra kudos if spotted. In a more puzzle-centric game I might have found that unsatisfying, but it worked fine here.

Our host did a good job of building atmosphere and tension at the start, but this is not a fear game – nervous players have little to worry about, other than maybe some mild claustrophobia.

This is a game with many cool highlights, and I’m going to talk about none of them here, so as not to spoil anything. But it manages to be immersive, fresh, and full of surprises, and even slips in a little humour with the action. In most places this would be comfortably the strongest game around – it’s a measure of how impressive games in Barcelona are that it wasn’t even the strongest game at the venue.