Fukuoka, Oct 2024
Hangover was the game I initially tried to book at this venue, despite the three person minimum, but the owner told me in fairly clear terms that it could not reasonably be completely by a team of two within the time limit. We then proceeded to beat the record in Wherehouse, so when we wanted to book a second game he agreed maybe we could try Hangover after all, just in case we were able to beat it. Spoiler: we failed, needing an extra twenty minutes to reach the end.
This is a classic ‘Hangover’ premise, recovering from a wild night in Vegas, where you need to not just find the key to leave but in the process work out the events of the night before. Our instructions included several elements, including tidying up the mess, and I liked the way that played out: normally you enter a tidy escape room and leave stuff all over the place, and this was a clever inversion of that.
Their Wherehouse game had the curious system of optional hint sheets placed in the room for you to look at or not, as you liked. Hangover had more or less the same thing, except that the optional hints all become available at the same point when you complete a particular step – which felt slightly odd, but worked well enough.
Like Wherehouse, Hangover is likely to strike most travelling enthusiasts as a fairly old fashioned style of room. It is a bit larger and more ambitious than its sister room though – which isn’t always in its favour. Two big puzzles in particular felt to me like they were cool thematic ideas that the designer couldn’t bear not to use, even though in their current form the puzzle logic isn’t quite tight enough; I thought getting the solutions for those involved some mind-reading of the designer’s thought process, where alternative answers could have been equally justified. In one case that was aggravated by flakey sensors, which the host pre-empted by coming in and making sure the mechanism triggered when we had the right answers.
However, although the ambitious puzzle design didn’t really come together for those two puzzles, it’s much more successful for other steps of the game – one in particular, a fairly physical step that was as satisfying an a-ha moment as I’ve had in some time.
Like Wherehouse, this is very much a puzzle experience, even if there’s a little more story this time round. It’s certainly trickier, and well suited to more people working in parallel. It’s also a bumpier ride, with more frustrations and weak moments but also more memorable high points (one in particular!). On balance I’d still point most players to Wherehouse ahead of this one, but if you have a larger team and fancy more of a challenge, this could be a good option. 
