Bangkok, Dec 2024
This was a rare game that I played solo, since I was passing through Bangkok on my own. The company doesn’t provide an online booking system, and don’t officially support teams smaller than two people, so it took some negotiation over WhatsApp to arrange a booking. It was much appreciated that the company agreed to let me try a solo game, particularly since they still charged me only their normal per-player price. They did also suddenly go silent for a couple of days when I tried to confirm for one of their premium games (different rooms have different prices) – which I suspect was because they were reluctant to confirm the slot for me while there was a chance a larger and higher-paying group might take it. My first choice of room did indeed then get booked up, so I ended up playing Illuminati conspiracy theme Lost Symbol.
It’s a room better suited for smaller teams, in that it starts in a fairly small dark space with only a single weak light source. That’s not representative of the entire game, however. Broadly speaking, Lost Symbol has sections with low lighting and a bit more of a sense of environment exploration, but the majority of the game is in a more traditional environment with better lighting and plenty of mostly padlock-based puzzles. The former parts would be cramped with more than two people, and in the latter sections it would be fine to have more people but there isn’t a compelling need for greater numbers.
The puzzle style here is classic escape room, with plentiful use of secret society tropes such as ciphers and cryptexes and mystical symbols; the sequence is largely but not wholly linear. Despite a tendency to use laminated paper items as clues, the props are of decent quality; and although it’s not a physical game, it still manages to give a good sense of exploration and discovery.
The most memorable step is the one that’s most incongruous with the theming, and seemed to have been thrown in on an impulse; but it adds variety to a game that’s otherwise very focused on symbols and ciphers. I found Lost Symbol a solid but mostly unremarkable game; it might be that the higher prices of some of the other rooms at the company indicate more of a wow factor in those, but I missed out on the chance to find out. 