Hounds Escape: Southern Dis-comfort

The US Deep South is not a common setting for an escape room, but if the clever pun of Hounds Escape’s second game hadn’t made the theme clear, the appearance of our host certainly would have; gleefully over the top, he took the stereotype of a southern US hillbilly and doubled down on it, lacking nothing but the ominous sound of Dueling Banjos in the background.

Your task is to break into the hideout of a rival gang and steal their moonshine, and in practice the game combines elements of break-in with break-out, along with a whole lot of its own distinctive style. Like the other game at the venue, everything that doesn’t need to be moved is immobilised, but in a way that didn’t particularly interrupt immersion. The result is an environment that feels realistically cluttered, but where there’s never any difficulty determining what is and is not part of the game.

It’s a great looking set, and the game then builds on the visuals with various effects; I won’t give any details, but there’s plenty here to impress and create drama. The flow is superb too: the early stages make it easy to hit the ground running, and it then expands out to an increasingly busy environment, and finds ways to gradually ramp up the pressure right through to the finale.

Different games at the same venue often share a design style. For instance, the two at Hounds both finish in ways that seem intended to increase the build up to the end, to make sure it doesn’t fall flat. Another quality that Southern Dis-comfort shares with Questionable Ethics is that it has a wealth of puzzles, and continues beyond the point I expected the game to be over. We felt like we were flying through and in danger of finishing too soon, so were pleased to find the game kept going with another chunk of puzzles.

The Sussex / Kent region below London has really become an escape room hotspot in the last few years. Hounds Escape is one of the reasons for that, with two (so far) really impressive games, of which I particularly enjoyed Southern Dis-comfort’s redneck riddles and hillbilly hilarity.