Brighton, Sep 2022
The latest game from Pier Pressure is the first to be based at their Paradox Parlour shop, which had a highly tempting array of goodies for sale and which also offers their museum of illusions – which we didn’t have a chance to explore this time but which I certainly hope to see in a future visit.
All Pier Pressure’s games are hosted in costume and in character, and we were met by one of the most enthusiastically piratical hosts I’ve yet encountered. Pier Pressure are well known for the high quality of their games, but I have to hand it to them for really nailing the experience outside the room too: all of the hosts we met did an excellent job, before, during and after the game.
While the theming has a piratical feel, this room’s story takes a different direction, which starts off with you breaking into the home of a suspected smuggler, to find out the secret of his success.
Set design and the technology used were as advanced as in any of this company’s games. The larger part of the game centres around a particular multi-step mechanism, where all the tasks are building towards a particular result. That gave it a very structured feel, where we had a sense of how near we were to the goal and roughly what we needed to do to get there.
I thought the two steps that teams are mostly likely to struggle with were right at the beginning and right at the end, so there’s a risk of problems getting going – but that’s less likely for experienced players.
Smuggler’s Secret comfortably reaches the high bar set by Pier Pressure’s other rooms. Whether you like this one better than their others will come down to personal taste; choose this one for the ye olde feel and for a ‘marvellous machine’ type of gameplay. Or just binge them all: like the others, it’s cleverly and slickly designed, looks good, and is exceedingly well run. 
