Fukuoka, Oct 2024
West Japan does not offer a wide selection of escape experiences available to English-speaking visitors; in the entire island of Kyushu the only one I could find was Escape Games Fukuoka. With such a lack of competition I arrived with low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised on first impressions of the lobby decor. Our host was American, and the venue aims to offer experiences closer to the ones available in Europe and North America, in contrast to the Japanese style of games which are more often limited time events that take place in a hall format with multiple teams.
I believe Wherehouse is this company’s original game, and although the premise sounded like it might include scare elements, there was nothing of the sort beyond starting in darkness and needing to work out how to get the lights on. It is in fact a puzzle game in the purest sense, 60 minutes of nonstop (and somewhat non-linear) solving. It’s labelled as beginner difficulty , but they also warn that their games are harder than those at other venues; I guess that that balances out to a middling level of challenge, which matches my impression.
This is a room that puts solving ahead of story or set. It’s spacious enough but not an unusually large game area, with straightforward decor and little narrative to speak of. You’ll see plenty of padlocks to open, though the puddles also use hidden electronics in plenty of places; and also a refreshing degree of physicality, where the puzzle constraints come from the layout of the room and the objects within it.
I found the puzzle logic rigorous and intuitive with few exceptions, though there was one step that rather broke convention in how it expected us to apply our solution to the locks. I’d complain that one puzzle required differentiating colours under inadequate light, but that turned out to be our fault not really the game’s. But it was a succession of solves that I thought made complete and satisfying sense on finding each solution. One even used a nice gadget that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
The hint system is a button to call the host into the room to give you a nudge, a system that I associate with low quality venues, though in contrast to those our host was very clearly paying attention throughout and was skilled at giving the smallest hint needed to get us unstuck. There’s also a curious system of printed A4 sheets left in the room, each of which gives a subtle visual clue for one of the puzzles, and it’s up to you whether to look at these or not – which sort of gives you a choice of game difficulty, based on whether you make use of these.
Travelling enthusiasts will likely find this an old fashioned style of escape room, in many respects. That’s fair enough, but I also found it thoroughly enjoyable, a concentrated blast of the sort of puzzle solving that made me interested in escape rooms in the first place. We had a sufficiently good time that we finished the room and booked into a second one on the spot. 
