Eureka: El Atraco

There are plenty of escape venues in Buenos Aires, but this branch of Eureka was just down the road from where we were staying, so we couldn’t not try one there. Their Facebook page suggested that El Atraco (The Robbery) was the newest of the ones available for two players, so that’s the one we chose.

From a large and atmospheric entrance hall, we were led into a small white room. There is of course more to the game, but the style here is to present you with a limited amount of space, with a limited number of puzzles, at a time. I quite liked that design – it encouraged us to persist at a couple of points where we might otherwise have asked for a hint, precisely because there were only so many places to look and things to consider.

Despite spending a while stuck on a couple of things, we ended up finishing in under half an hour with no clues. I didn’t get the impression it was unusually easy, and in fact it’s the kind of room where the beginning is one of the points where you’re most likely to need a clue.

The ending was anti-climatic, in that we released a door and found ourselves in the venue corridor, from which we needed to go search for our host; he was having a quiet break and clearly wasn’t expecting us out so soon (though he would still have been contactable on the walkie talkie if we’d needed help). More generally I’d describe the hosting as sufficient, at a basic level; a step down from a host who has a clear love of escape rooms.

I quite enjoyed the puzzles, though I’d probably be more inclined to quibble with a couple of points if we’d taken a hint for them instead of eventually working them out. A lot of them have only tenuous connections to the robbery theme, but they still made for a satisfying series of abstract puzzle chambers; with more attentive hosting I’d have scored the room one notch higher.