FunEscape: Zen Master

FunEscape is located some way out of Warsaw centre. On the Sunday lunchtime we visited, there seemed to be a children’s birthday party visiting (room escapes in Warsaw appear to sometimes cater for a younger audience than most UK games), and the waiting area was chaotic and noisy. It was therefore a relief to enter the chilled ambience of the first section of this game.

The backstory is that there’s a Zen Master who’s been battling the local mafia, whose house has been rigged with a bomb that you need to defuse. It’s far from clear why the Zen Master can’t do it himself, or for that matter just make sure he’s not home when it explodes, but never mind – it’s an excuse for a Japanese-themed room centred around a bomb defusal task.

It’s pretty in a rather plastic way, particularly at the start, but many of the props thereafter seem to have been grabbed from a raid on a discount Oriental souvenirs shop, mixed in with plenty of padlocks and a handful of laminated sheets. The final bomb is a glorified keypad – although to be fair, it looks fantastic, and is by some way the coolest item in the game. It’s just a bit of a disappointment that disarming it involves a simple code instead of, say, something involving wires.

There’s a fun skill-based task, and the puzzles hit a good balance between being fair and not being too simple. It’s all a bit thrown together though, as if someone grabbed an assortment of Japanese knick-knacks and looked for ways to use them as puzzle clues. Pleasant enough but Warsaw has much better games.