Skurrilum: Ghost Hunter Ernie Hudson and the Zoo of Death

Expectations were very high for this adventure of Ghost Hunter Ernie Hudson and the Wailing Woman after it was voted best in the world by the Top Escape Project in 2018. The Wailing Woman room is definitely very well designed, decorated and executed, there was about 6 different rooms throughout the hour and it was really hard to tell where the doors were and what was going to be the next surprise.

The first room itself was great, I'm wondering if it wasn't my favourite room of the whole hour, even though it was technically only one puzzle in there, I just loved the immersion straight away.

The radio play really allows to never lose track of the story unfolding in front of your eyes, we knew why we were here and progressively what we were going to achieve to complete the room. The radio play system though, despite being described as an innovative system, didn't feel as well executed as other German companies I tried, like the Room in Berlin or Hidden in Hamburg. I often felt like the radio play was interrupting us in our actions more than narrating them (for example, we found a paper and right when my teammate was reading it, the radio play interrupted us to explain what the paper was saying. It should have either been triggered as soon as we put our hands on it or after we finished reading it.). But those narration is still a strong point of the room, it is needed to understand the story which is really strong and some puzzles were entirely relying on interacting with the narration which gave it strength.

Our game master, 'Jannus' was very enthusiastic and friendly and it helped putting us in the mood of that new Ernie Hudson adventure which character (and music) is very attaching. The amount of work that was put into those rooms and puzzles is really impressive. I don't want to say too much to not give it away but you do feel like you are travelling a lot and going through a large number of locations.

The room wasn't flawless as one puzzle had us beaten. A dexterity puzzle that didn't allow an easy reset and therefore forced the game master to direct us to a emergency key in order to skip the puzzle. I believe a room should not contain a puzzle that might block the game or stop the flow as it breaks the immersion and gives the player the feeling of unaccomplishment. Another puzzle seemed to have been missing or broken as one of the game masters previously told us that dressing up is required in the Wailing Woman, but dressing up didn't seem to have triggered anything in our room. Plus, there were two footprints on the floor at some point that didn't lead to anything which felt like a bug or that something was incorrectly reset in the room.

Overall, it is a very strong room with an impressive design that will keep everyone speechless. The Ernie Hudson stories are strong and very well written. It's a very enjoyable room for a team of 3-5 players!