by Mama Bazooka (website)
Nijverheidsweg 5, 3751 LP
4-6 players
Languages: EN, NL
60 minutes
Overall rating
based on ratings from 30 users
combined with 9 pro reviews
Your review
Player reviews
A very easy one word review: bonkers
Loved this game even after all the hype, great variety of challenges and some amazing reveals / tasks to do.
This was absolutely fantastic! I found myself constantly reflecting on what had just happened and marveling at how we ended up where we were. It was incredibly fun, truly unforgettable, and an adventure I’ll cherish forever.
We were constantly amazed and surprised throughout the experience—nothing went as expected, and it was fantastic in every way. The unpredictability added an extra layer of excitement, making it incredibly fun and intense. A truly cool and memorable adventure!
We’ve talked through every step and every puzzle of this game at least three times and we can’t get over it. So fun, so stressful at times, so cool. You gotta do it.
It's genius, really, and truly is one of those 'just go and play it' games where you need to embrace the lunacy and throw yourself into every moment because - as with anything truly enjoyable - it will be over before you know it and you'll be wishing you could go back to the beginning to play it again.
This game is now "old" but what happens in the game still surpasses most games that are being created today.
It is very easy to see why this game has been so talked about and so well rated. You simply cannot miss this game.
So, The Dome is the one people talk about; unsurprisingly because of its ridiculous budget and therefore production values, scale, variety in themes...
It is spectacular and if you're touring around for the best games, you definitely need to play it. It's a 5* star game, and yet it's certainly not perfect. In fact, our team didn't really get along with it. It's clever, and certainly well maintained but it feels like there's something not quite right in the design of the game that if it wasn't so impressive in other ways would make me want to remove a star. We didn't leave joyful or satisfied but instead frustrated.
The game definitely seems to take pleasure in messing with you, and for much of the experience, that's fine and fun. Other moments have you questioning whether or not your teammates are messing up, and when it's such a team based room it really put a rift into our team.
It's tough to explain without spoilers, and the less you know about this one, probably the better, but to give a very vague example of what I mean, there's a communication puzzle that requires you give instructions through an intercom of what to do... except they pump up the volume of the music at this stage, so you're shouting over each other to pass on instructions. That would be annoying on its own, but the intercom also has a delay on it, so you're shouting to someone else, who is shouting into the intercom, and the person receiving the instructions seems to be ignoring you. Other moments force you to fail at some reasonably simple tasks which makes you question whether your teammate is a moron or perhaps if the tech was faulty. Neither option is something you want to be feeling when you play an escape room. Of course our host was lovely in explaining all this to us afterwards, with a decent enough reason for it from a game-run standpoint which gave us a bit of relief that we weren't morons, and restored faith in the room, but it was too late at that point. The last couple of puzzles were a bit anticlimactic given the rest of the room, but ultimately you'll appreciate the experience as a whole anyway, so this isn't a big problem.
The debrief is fantastic and unique, but at that point we weren't in a position to enjoy it as much as we should have.
Given the flaws I've mentioned, it doesn't seem like it should be getting a 5* score, but the rest of it is just so outrageously elaborate that i can't bring myself to remove a star. So if you're going to play this one - and you should - go into it knowing that the game is going to mess with you, and have in the back of your mind that The Dome may deliberately try to make you and your teammates fail at certain points.
Top room and incredible space. A must do room. Expect to race against the clock as a lot to do in the hour.
incredible experience. Worth the trip to the Netherlands.
A three Michelin star restaurant is said to be so good that it's worth planning a special journey to eat there. That's how I feel about The Dome. Even though I know that virtually none of my friends here in the US are going to make the trip to Bunschoten, I can't help but try to convince them because it is totally worth it. It's such a brilliant combination of mechanisms, theming, environment.
Deserves all it's praise. Not to miss
Reviews by escape room review sites
You may have heard of The Dome. In fact, I'm tempted to write two versions of this review: one for those who've never heard it mentioned, and another for everyone who knows of it as the game that came top of the 2019 TERPECA awards, the current reigning champion of the English-speaking world's escape room scene. Hype kills enjoyment and no escape room, however magnificent, can live up to such billing; the best way to play it is to stumble across it having heard nothing about it in advance. But i...
It’s best played with very little expectations (though I suppose being for a while #1 in the world does come with it a certain level of expectation), so I’ll leave the review with just one final question:
However, our experience with The Dome was one of the best Escape Room experiences we have ever had. Because The Dome is much more than just an Escape Room, it is THE Escape Room. It is the essence of everything that makes up an Escape Room, no other room has managed to call up this range of emotions in me and my fellow players like The Dome.
