Tashkent, May 2024
As far as I could ascertain, there are no escape rooms in Tashkent that can be played in English – the primary language used in the game is Russian. Lovushka Kvest was the only company that I got a reply from, and they made it clear that some materials would use Russian language, but if we wanted to try playing they had no objections. Our host spoke fairly decent English, which was encouraging; I also persuaded them to let me take my phone in, against their normal rules, so that I could use Google Translate if necessary.
Where the escape room industry is not well established in a country, I expect to find games similar to those I played in the UK eight or ten years ago: usually simpler decor, less story, lower budget construction, more hit-and-miss puzzles. That was not the case here – several characteristics of National Treasure were strikingly impressive and modern. For a start, the room was a large space comprised of multiple areas, enough that our host at one point needed to warn us not to split up. The decorations are a little on the flimsy side in places, but look great – you’re in an entire small town, with atmospheric lighting and audio. Visually, this is a construction that compares favourably to many recent rooms in Western Europe.
It’s also a game with an actor – maybe multiple actors, certainly multiple characters. This is a heist story in which you’re trying to steal an Egyptian statuette, and progressing involves various interactions with NPC characters. Their English was good enough to improvise off-the-cuff dialogue, and the result was both amusing and moved the game forward in clever ways. One sequence in particular was a really nice variant on the idea of having your heist interrupted by a guard, and was easily my favourite moment of the game.
In pretty much every other way, the game was a shambles. A big chunk of that was the language barrier. There were lots of things written in Russian, most irrelevant, but a couple of things crucial. My phone was essential for translating these, though also a bit of a slow bottleneck; it was often hard to know whether we should be slogging through the translations in the hope that something would turn out to be needed, or whether it was just a waste of time. Doubly so because at various points we found ourselves in a situation where we genuinely couldn’t solve anything or move forward until an actor appeared to do something.
Several elements looked suspiciously like ghost puzzles, in that they clearly seemed to be puzzle elements but we ended up not doing anything with them. With at least three puzzles the host told us some essential bit of information needed to solve a puzzle; in one case that was because they’d disabled a Russian-language piece of audio that would have supplied it, but in the other cases it seemed like they relied on the host just telling the players what they needed to do. The result was that throughout the game we barely solved anything; the host had a tendency to give us instructions even when language wasn’t an issue.
My guess is that this room is influenced by the Russian escape room scene, and that’s the reason it’s so ambitious in concept and impressive in presentation. At the same time, I got the impression that no-one at the venue particularly plays escape rooms or understands them, and this may have resulted in a game that’s considerably more confusing and disjointed than its original design. Without the language barrier it would still be a flawed experience, though partially redeemed by all the interactive elements. As it is, unless you can read Russian it’s a bit of a car crash – though a car crash that I still managed to find pretty entertaining, once I’d stopped hoping for a satisfying puzzle experience. 
