Game Over Rome: Chocolate Factory

I was in Rome for a long weekend with friends for geocaching.  When we saw the weather forecast, we decided that an indoor plan would be a good idea for the forecast thunderstorm!

We chose this game for its language independence in-room, and the strong English on the website which made us confident that any hinting we needed would work.  The theme was unusual, and not scary, so we settled on this room.

The venue's easy to find, and has a small lobby area and large lockable cupboards for your stuff.

We theoretically had three tasks - discover the secret recipe, discover how the machine works, and escape before security comes back.  However, for the most part, the puzzles didn't feel like we were in a factory working towards those aims.  More a case of "this puzzle leads to a solution that fits what this particular padlock out of 'all the available unlocked ones we've had the whole game' needs" which didn't feel immersive.

There's one puzzle which to be honest, wasn't very covid-safe, and probably could have been adapted for now.  This choice seemed even stranger as this was the first venue in the 3 days we'd been in Rome which cared about our Green Passes!

The route through the puzzles is very (possibly completely) linear, so I think the three of us that there were was enough.

The game doesn't seem to make use of automated unlocking in puzzles where it would make sense to, which did lead to a short delay while the puzzlemaster manually confirmed we'd done the right thing.  They also started hinting us on something we'd already completed (two puzzles earlier) which was confusing and wasted some time, and suggested they weren't really following what we were doing fully.

A final unexpected thing was the lack of a clock in the room, making it hard to gauge our progress or how long we had left before being able to ask another hint (the hint policy is 'when you have asked for a hint, you can't ask again for 10 minutes' which is just indicated with a light).