Kraków, Sep 2023
With only a day to spend in the beautiful historic city of Kraków, we… booked ourselves into an impulse escape room, of course. Gamescape is out to the west of the centre, but close enough to be walkable, and has a sufficiently large selection of rooms that they were able to provide one at short notice. Dragon’s Curse seemed like a good choice, as a 75 minute room.
It’s an oriental theme based around the Chinese zodiac. You need to collect twelve medallions corresponding to the zodiac animals; they’re pleasingly chunky discs, and we were glad of the satchel provided to carry them in.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the game progresses through multiple areas. Each section is decorated in a distinctive and different way, leaning heavily on the usual Oriental stereotypes but creating a striking and cool game area. I liked the structure too, mostly non-linear within each section, with each new medallion being a payoff that leaves you closer to your goal.
We had nitpicks with a small number of the puzzles. In one the instruction text was thematic but doing what it said was less effective than just looking for hidden sensors. With another, I maintain that the solution I was trying was entirely logical and consistent with the clues, though not the solution intended by the designer. And a third had features that seemed to be pushing us fairly hard towards what turned out to be a wrong solution.
That said, in other respects Dragon’s Curse had puzzles that were varied, challenging and satisfying to solve. One in particular stuck in my mind as a clever and original idea. It’s also a room that keeps opening up and revealing one secret after another.
A few rough edges in some of the puzzle design kept this room from being quite as impressive as it ought to be, but it was still very worth playing; we didn’t even regret the lost sightseeing time. 
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