Turtle Rush: Casino Heist

There are almost no escape rooms available to play on Mauritius; currently it sees to be just Turtle Rush in the north, and a company called Dodo Quest that may still run games for the public inside one of the resorts on the southern coast. Getting to Turtle Quest’s location by public transport was quite a mission, and finding our way inside was a challenge also, and it would give me great pleasure to say that the game was entirely worth it – but sadly, I can’t.

This heist game started us off with a rules briefing and a nudge towards the starting point. It wasn’t a fantastic first impression; the decor was plain and slightly sad, clue items plonked down in office space that felt a bit too big for the game items it contained, leaving a lot of empty wall and empty carpet. That improved somewhat as the game progressed, but didn’t really rise above ‘functional’.

Fairly soon we found ourselves casting around aimlessly, between various sets of items that (it turned out) couldn’t be used until later, and what was probably a ghost puzzle, whereas the room actually wanted us to search. Thereafter we made steadier progress, but it felt in spite of the puzzle design not because of it; at several points it felt like we were trying to guess the designer’s intention to compensate for ambiguous clues or information made harder to follow by wear and tear. At least one step also involved doing something that you’d usually be warned not to do in an escape room.

This wasn’t a game that was outright dreadful, but it persistently threw up unwanted friction, the opposite of the feeling of ‘flow’ that you get from a well-designed game. I don’t think this is a case of us happening to struggle with the room; in fact our host was quite surprised that we finished in less than an hour, and said that most groups go considerably over.

The host was very nice, and clued well; there were a couple of quite nice ideas in there; but that’s unlikely to amount to a reason to go play this, unless perhaps for the rarity value of playing an escape room in Mauritius.