Unreal Room Escape: La Mina

Barcelona boasts far more than its fair share of world class games, but La Mina was still notable for having won TERPECA awards in both 2019 and 2020, giving it a pedigree that’s hard to match.

At 90 mins this is a bumper size game. In fact, it’s pretty packed even compared to other 90 mins games. After playing a room, I normally make notes on the puzzles it contained, since otherwise the details fade rapidly from my mind. With La Mina that was a challenge – because it contained so. many. puzzles. Expect rapid-fire solving, a non-stop flurry of locks and puzzles where every time you complete one area another one opens behind it. The challenge comes more from the quantity of puzzles than from any individual puzzle being unusually tricky, which means a fast-paced high-adrenaline experience.

In at least two places we managed to accidentally skip over puzzles, because they provided information that wasn’t essential to a solution – giving us the final digit for a code, or prompting us to find something in some dark corner which we’d already spotted. Between the quick pace, the many puzzles and the not entirely linear structure, I barely noticed that at the time, just registering a little confusion that there seemed to be a couple of unsolved puzzles behind us and nothing was sending us back to them. But I guess we should just have been more thorough about making sure we stuck to the intended sequence.

Beyond that, describing La Mina turns into a string of superlatives. This is a luscious game that gives you a non-stop succession of cool moments. Expansive and atmospheric, the game space feels authentically subterranean while being big enough to leave us thoroughly disoriented, and all the more immersed into the game as a result. And it provides more than nice set dressing – it makes you feel like you’re venturing into an abandoned mine in much more tactile ways too.

If you’ve been sufficiently spoiled by truly impressive games, you could argue that La Mina shows its age a bit in the style of some of its puzzles, with some that feel a bit like arbitrary codes for the sake of it, and a couple of effects that are very cool if you’re seeing them for the first time, but have been imitated so widely that you probably won’t be. But that’s in the context of a huge array of puzzles of all kinds, and a host of memorable moments – for any puzzle that you might criticise, there are four others that are cool, hands-on, unusual, immersive, or all of those at once. It may have narrowly missed out on getting a third TERPECA in the most recent set of awards, but you really really should play it nonetheless.