Sofia, Apr 2024
I really want to like Road to Freedom. It has so much going for it, starting with the original setting in which you are Bulgarian partisans in 1876, striving for national independence from the Ottoman Empire. This room looks impressive and immersive from the start, and turns out to be spacious in a way few rooms are, successfully evoking a feeling of being in 19th Century Bulgaria with its detailed and plausibly authentic decor.
In several places the puzzles show real creativity and charm in design and implementation, tied into the setting and decorations. And if you love search tasks, then I could just end the review here as a warm recommendation.
However, I’m not keen on search at the best of times, and here the searching is relentless, and tricky, and often across a large area, to the point where midway through we were losing all energy and enthusiasm. We played as a team of three, and this is a rare room that I guess might suit a team larger than four, not because of the quantity of puzzles but just because more pairs of eyes would make this aspect of the game less painful.
Language/cultural differences also caused sticking points, such as a three character code for a four digit lock, which might be intuitive to local players but was baffling for us; or a clue that was ambiguous in English but apparently not in the original Bulgarian.
Road to Freedom has huge potential and maybe for a different group could be a memorable and engrossing experience. For us it was dispiriting hard work, often confusing, in a way that took away from the many very distinctive and interesting features of the room. To be fair, I should note that we played it at the end of a full day of escape rooms and so didn’t bring as much energy as we might have otherwise. It’s a game that was obviously created with a lot of passion and care, and even though it didn’t flow well for us I feel bad about rating it as low as this.
So if you’re playing a selection of Sofia’s top rooms then this is not an obvious candidate for the list; but you might consider trying it anyhow, if you’re interested in something a little different, and are happy to do a whole lot of searching. 
