Vienna, Sep 2022
Thrice a TERPECA winner, Going Underground has a firmly established reputation as the top game in Austria. It’s at a separate location to the other Crime Runners rooms, and where the others form a single story, Going Underground seems to be a stand-alone narrative. In this one, you’re a team sent to investigate unexpected seismic activity and a possible bomb left over from World War 2, somewhere beneath the city.
This is a game that starts strong and just keeps going from one cool moment to another. It wasn’t long before I’d lost all sense of where we were in relation to the outside world, or indeed to earlier parts of the game; and was also happily unaware of how long we’d spent in the game.
The game name implies a journey, and that’s how the experience feels: a progression from one scene to another, deeper into the physical space and also into the story. Each section felt almost stand-alone, a self-contained set of challenges like different levels in a computer game. It’s not a room that overwhelms you with the quantity of things to do at once, but one which tends to give you a smaller number of meatier tasks to figure out.
I particularly liked one puzzle that involved out of the box thinking; after playing this many rooms, I start lazily assuming that if I seem to be lacking items I should wait until I unlock the rest later, instead of thinking whether I could actually solve it with what I currently had. I’d love to see more puzzle design that encourages player ingenuity and resourcefulness.
Physicality is also a strength (no pun intended). A combination of dramatic effects and large-scale props left us feeling like we were actually interacting with our surroundings not just solving puzzle items placed in a themed room.
From conversation with the owner afterwards, it was also clear that the room design smoothly copes with teams of different experience levels, allowing dynamic adjustment of the difficulty during the game to match how well the players are doing.
It’s slick and full of surprises throughout, but most of all it’s just a lot of fun. More than some of the other acclaimed top games in Europe, it’s hard to imagine a team not having a good time here. 
