Pandora Experience: Shutter Asylum

At time of writing there are only two escape room companies open on Bali, and the one you’re much more likely to encounter is Pandora Experience, a chain active throughout Indonesia. They advertise their games with movie-style posters, and the one we went for was clearly inspired by the film Shutter Island, though in practice the story goes in an entirely different direction. That story is provided via an intro movie and through multiple atmospheric voice-overs, but primarily at the end via a plot-dump explanation delivered when you open the final door.

The atmosphere is ominous but none of the actual content is scary. It is however fairly dark throughout. This was frustrating at a few points – both times when we needed to find things in a large poorly lit area, and the time where we needed to read under dim red lighting, similar to a photography darkroom.

What Pandora does very well is the set builds. In Shutter Asylum the style is sparse, but the space is large. You progress through one area after another, and there are two particular highlights that many teams will be talking about long after they play. For spoiler reasons I won’t give details, but note that the confirmation email instructs players to come wearing shorts.

The puzzles seemed the weaker part of the game. It wasn’t that they were illogical, but some were a bit of a stretch; the sort of thing where we might think of the correct approach but dismiss it as implausible. Other sections were entirely reasonable. With two hours to complete a linear game, I’d guess they expect teams to spend a while stuck on the trickier steps, until they ultimately hit the right answer or resort to taking a hint. In the end I think it was only one actual puzzle that we needed a hint to solve; at other times it was the low light levels that meant we needed a pointer. Despite the linear structure, having a slightly larger team might be an advantage there: it’s easier to search a large area when there are more of you to do so.

Escaping from an asylum shares a lot of tropes with a jailbreak story, and this felt like a jailbreak; it did very well at creating a sense of progressing deeper and deeper into a facility without finding an exit. There’s a pleasingly physical feeling to much of the game, which suited the setting. If they’d provided torches for better lighting then it would very likely have won me over a lot more; if you’re used to relatively modest escape room sets then you should try this for the wow factor. But if you’ve played some of the world class games in Europe and the US, then this will be enjoyable but not mind-blowing, despite the cool design.