Skopje, Mar 2020
Escape Room Skopje’s website is artistic and clever and fairly impenetrable, at least if you don’t read Macedonian, so I recommend using their Facebook page to book. Their game The Cult appears to have been Skopje’s first escape room; they also have an interesting-sounding second game, but frustratingly I didn’t realise that until we reached the venue, by which point it was too late to play it as well.
Escape rooms have evolved and changed a great deal over the few years since they exploded across the globe. They’ve become vastly more sophisticated, slick and high-tech; sometimes that produces a more enjoyable game, but not always. The Cult harks right back to the early days of games hand-built by one puzzle enthusiast in a spare basement, with lots of custom wooden mechanisms and a focus on clever puzzles first and foremost.
Visually, The Cult is very back to basics – think furniture and a few decorations in a somewhat tatty spare room. The plot is that you’re instigating the secret headquarters of a world-spanning cult, looking for their secrets and for a magical green crystal in their possession – which was a little incongruous with the location, although used well for the game’s ending.
However simple to look at, The Cult was thoroughly enjoyable to play. If you’ve played a fairly high number of games then the puzzles here aren’t going to blow your mind, but they’re varied and clever, and most of all well-designed. Each puzzle resolved neatly to an unambiguous code number or other solution, something that was sadly not so common in the other games I played in the region.
If you’re looking for a beautifully crafted immersive world, then The Cult may not do much for you; but as a traditional style puzzle experience I had no complaints, and would happily have played more at the venue if I’d been able. 
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