Tallinn, Jun 2016
Dracula was both unusually search-heavy and also relied on semi-darkness, which isn’t a fantastic combination. To make it worse, one of the clues was hidden in a location that we assumed was intended to be off-limits.
It’s easy to blame a room when you feel you struggled with it more than you should have, and maybe if we’d focused on search a lot more from the beginning we’d have come away with warmer feelings for it. But I’d still encourage players to choose one of the other rooms ahead of this one. 
This room had a number of bugbears that meant I would steer clear:
- Identical combination padlocks where it’s not clear which one you’re trying to solve
- too many padlocks
- puzzles not original
- whilst search heavy isn’t a problem, search heavy in a very dark room is poor design
- we avoided looking in an area we would normally consider off limits – good rooms should make this clear.
Overally the frustration at repeatedly searching for one thing for 20 minutes in a large, dark and very dirty room means this is probably my second least favourite room. 
