Logiccastle: Immortal

There were several venues that would have been easier to reach, while we were staying in Cyprus; getting to Logiccastle from Larnaca town involved a bus ride up to the suburb of Oroklini. But the 2.5hr game time intrigued me enough to try it, and I was thoroughly glad I did.

There is a story here, about a magician and a tragedy, though it didn’t seem to feature much after the intro video; and although there was a video to set the scene, the game start was a lot more involving and interesting than that might suggest.

But this is an escape room for those who love puzzles above all. This is a strictly linear design, where you might have clues for multiple puzzles at once but only one of them will be solvable, and solving that one will provide something needed to solve the next. That might be a downside for a larger team of experienced players; it perfectly suited us as a team of two.

While the game certainly uses electronics in various places, the majority of the content is based on purely physical mechanisms, often using padlocks. And with the puzzles being front-and-centre, what struck me was how precisely and efficiently each solution came together. It shows when a game has been created by someone with a really strong sense for puzzle design; each time something seemed like a set of clues might be ambiguous or incomplete, it then turned out that I hadn’t yet fully understood the puzzle. It had me exclaiming out loud more than once at how neat and satisfying a solution was.

Escape rooms have evolved a lot in the last decade, in multiple directions. Immortal doesn’t have the narrative immersion, gigantic scale, or spectacular effects of some of the current top games; it involves little that you couldn’t have found in an escape room in 2016. That’s not a criticism. On the contrary, to me it captured so much of what I originally loved about escape rooms: the originality and playfulness of pure puzzles for their own sake, the quirkiness of design and the satisfaction of the solve, the sense that you’re standing in a room that doesn’t just contain puzzles but which is itself a puzzle.

I’d confidently recommend Immortal to pretty much any escape room players, but more strongly to some than others. If you’re looking for large-scale immersive action, that’s not what this provides. If on the other hand you’ve, say, played a dozen rooms in Athens and wished that there were fewer horror games and a lot more puzzles, then this might be a reason to book a plane to Cyprus next time.