Rome, Jul 2024
After two months playing escape rooms in places where the industry is not so developed, walking into the start of this game was a true pleasure – and I suspect it’ll have a similar effect on all but the most jaded. This Alice in Wonderland adaptation is creative with its opening and lavish with its use of space. I’ve played entire escape rooms that were smaller and much less decorated than the section that this game uses purely to set the scene.
It was also refreshing to play a room that claimed to be playable in English and actually was throughout – at least, apart from a couple of videos with Italian audio, which seemed to be non-essential.
I found several of the earlier puzzles arguably a bit unintuitive, but also quite tricky and interesting. Or rather, I think they would have been; our host was a bit too quick to jump in with unsolicited advice before we’d had much chance to think about them properly. For me this was the biggest flaw in an otherwise delightful game, and one that could probably have been avoided if I’d made our preferences clearer during the briefing. The hints were also pre-recorded and on some occasions just told us things we already knew – no matter how skilled the voice actor, if the host is giving clues only from a fixed palette of options, they won’t be able to run the game as well as they should. Perhaps the host eventually heard my requests for fewer hints, or maybe we just seemed less in need of them thereafter, but it became less of a problem as the game went on.
In any case, the physical design of this room made me actually exclaim with delight out loud, once or even twice. As at the start, they’ve gone the extra mile to create it with whimsy and charm, very much in the spirit of the book by which it’s inspired.
We finished with twenty minutes spare, so the level of hinting was definitely excessive; and when we solved the final step we didn’t realise we’d finished until the host burst in to tell us. But all sins are (mostly) forgiven here, because it’s just such a pretty and appealing space. And the puzzle content is worth your time too, particularly in the first half, if you can avoid getting rushed past it. 
