smudgepuss

Our enjoyment of this was severely hampered by what turned out to be a printing error.  We had one component that was missing a printed area (but it's not in a location where you would expect printing so we couldn't tell there was supposed to be something there), which probably cost us about 30 minutes of actual time plus the 17 minutes that taking the three hints to get the answer added to our clock.  This was incredibly frustrating, and lets down the otherwise high production quality.

We generally enjoyed the puzzles, although I did find a few of them to be a bit lacking in a connection between 'the way you get the answer' and 'a plausible in-world mechanism for that to be the case'.  In one case, I was convinced that what my friend was trying to do wasn't right (it was) due to the way the artwork was drawn.

As with the other two Mystery Agency games we've played, the components were of decent quality (apart from the printing error), and we did enjoy the way story dealt with the missing evidence.  The game is fully reset-able, although there are some parts which may be more obvious to subsequent players due to handling.  The outer container isn't as robust as with the other two games so might not survive as many resets as the other two - our copy had one bit that was slightly torn before we started.

We really enjoyed this room!  The story is that you're in a crashed plane, and need to escape to safety, working through a number of rooms to do so (they tell you how many at the start, but I won't add that to the review).  We found the rooms to be realistically-themed for each room's location.  That said, the 'crashed plane' aspect is more 'landed somewhere unexpected with just a broken cockpit window' so there's no gore or significant plane damage if you wanted to avoid anything with a significantly crashed plane.  However, we didn't really feel like the rooms as a whole really fit the story of trying to escape from a crashed plane to safety as at one point we were in a location that was clearly safe and populated and the game takes you into less safe places! 

There was a good mix of puzzles and styles, and some fun interactive elements.

We did find the final room quite busy and had quite a lot of things going on at once, and possibly would have benefitted from a wider variety of lock types or more obvious hint item to locked item links, so it felt less like brute-forcing.  There was also one puzzle that made an incorrect/atypical use of a hint item, without there being any way of knowing that the combination you get by using it the normal way is nearly-but-not-quite-right.  It didn't take too long to think to try the other option, but you could also easily assume that what you were trying was totally wrong and look for a different approach.

We did think that there had been a lot of content in one game; we all felt like we were making fast progress through the room, but we still only had 4 minutes something left when we escaped.  In the post-game discussion with our host it turns out that the room is designed such that a team that doesn't escape could return and make more progress another time.  This I guess makes sense given that it's the only room escape place on the island, but something to be aware of if you're a holiday visitor.  Our team's relatively experienced, so I'd say we would normally expect to escape a room, and in about 45 minutes with at most one or two hints, so if your team's at a more 'it'll be close to see if we escape' pace it's possible you won't even see everything.

Easy to reach by several bus routes.

I was in Rome for a long weekend with friends for geocaching.  When we saw the weather forecast, we decided that an indoor plan would be a good idea for the forecast thunderstorm!

We chose this game for its language independence in-room, and the strong English on the website which made us confident that any hinting we needed would work.  The theme was unusual, and not scary, so we settled on this room.

The venue's easy to find, and has a small lobby area and large lockable cupboards for your stuff.

We theoretically had three tasks - discover the secret recipe, discover how the machine works, and escape before security comes back.  However, for the most part, the puzzles didn't feel like we were in a factory working towards those aims.  More a case of "this puzzle leads to a solution that fits what this particular padlock out of 'all the available unlocked ones we've had the whole game' needs" which didn't feel immersive.

There's one puzzle which to be honest, wasn't very covid-safe, and probably could have been adapted for now.  This choice seemed even stranger as this was the first venue in the 3 days we'd been in Rome which cared about our Green Passes!

The route through the puzzles is very (possibly completely) linear, so I think the three of us that there were was enough.

The game doesn't seem to make use of automated unlocking in puzzles where it would make sense to, which did lead to a short delay while the puzzlemaster manually confirmed we'd done the right thing.  They also started hinting us on something we'd already completed (two puzzles earlier) which was confusing and wasted some time, and suggested they weren't really following what we were doing fully.

A final unexpected thing was the lack of a clock in the room, making it hard to gauge our progress or how long we had left before being able to ask another hint (the hint policy is 'when you have asked for a hint, you can't ask again for 10 minutes' which is just indicated with a light).

This is a very convincingly-made cave, although the scenery doesn't reach all the way to the ceiling which does break the immersion.

This room had lots of good tactile puzzles, with the elements being fairly in keeping with the theme and environment, which was good.  We did find that it was hard to tell what had caused the unlocking sometimes, especially with a larger group and people doing things in parallel.  This was slightly compounded by one puzzle unlocking even though I'm convinced we didn't finish it if what I was trying to do was right (the gemstone puzzle).

We found all the puzzles very straightforward, but we it was the only game they had available when we booked and was a lower difficulty rating than we'd have chosen had we been less last minute.  It's a nice touch that if you do get out super quickly, they'll offer you a free drink to make up for the reduced amount of time that you've been entertained for.  Which is good because we were expecting there to be a whole extra stage at a certain point and it was a bit disappointing to open the door and be out on the corridor!

This was the second of these games we've played, and we all rated it as being significantly better than The Balthazar Stone.

The build quality is excellent - if being nitpicky the chain around the box falls off with light handling and certainly won't contain that ghost!

The puzzles all seemed well-constructed, and the story was well-woven throughout the puzzle.  It did feel like we were trying to solve the a mystery, not just work out the answer.

I've rated it as 'creepy' as there are ominous written messages from the ghost within the puzzle materials, which some may find creepy.  There are no sudden scares or similar.

We approached this a little unsure of how it would end up.  The promo material left us fairly certain that it would have a decent build quality, but we were unsure of how the puzzles and story would play out: a decent challenge for puzzlers, or a name famous in a different realm cashing in on the escape room bandwagon?

As we expected, the materials were all generally good quality, although on unlocking the stone at the end, we realised that this bit of the box wasn't glued and we could have just slid the wood aside without troubling the padlock!

When it came to the puzzles, we found that some puzzle elements weren't coherent with the story's timeline, which lead to us not realising that we hadn't used some things fully.  The overall story didn't quite hang together.

We've only done 2 of the 3 so far - do this one before The Ghost in The Attic as it's the weaker of the two.

Really enjoyed this room.  One thing to bear in mind if you're after the thrill of the escape is that you're trying to steal as many of the 12 gold bars as you can from their locked safety deposit boxes before the Police arrive.  Therefore it's more of a 'room entry' game with a score out of 12 than a 'room escape' game.  This does also mean that even though the room is rated as 'hard', even with a less experienced group, you'll probably still get into the vault, and it's a question of how much you steal.

I felt that the room was thematically strong - it did feel like it could be a small branch of a random independent bank!  Albeit one with  very poor security procedures...  There is one thing that you have to do that is thematically out of line with a heist (so we didn't do it for about 5 minutes), that then also doesn't work in the way that is would in a bank (in operation or location), which was a bit of a shame.  We did manage to make one critical part of the equipment freeze and had to have the GM come in to fix it, which I've taken half a star off for (particularly as it sounded like a not uncommon issue and could be addressed with reprinting a sign).

I was impressed that our GM was honest enough to recommend that we *didn't* do their easiest game based on our performance in this one.

And we'll be forever annoyed about not managing to get the 12th gold bar.

I really wanted to like this one more than I did, as it looked very promising.

The puzzles were fairly straightforward, and we did have a bit of a technical issue with one switch.  I didn't really find it noticeably more immersive than any other rooms I've done - perhaps because of the too-loud and over the top constant sound effects (I don't think codebreakers would have been working in rooms so loud you have to shout over the sound of the aerial gunfight that you can somehow hear from your underground bunker), but the immersion was worse the further through the game you got.

6 people is definitely too many - the last 10/15 minutes was basically a 1/2 person job so we finished on a bit of a low as most of us had just been standing around for a while.

You will get dusty in this, it's unavoidable.  And there is a part with a very enclosed space.

This room had more scary parts than we were expecting.  This did slow us down, as we were wimps and didn't want to open things!  Puzzles were alright, but not mindblowing.

As a Girlguiding member, I really wanted this to be a good experience, not just jumping on the room escape bandwagon.  But unfortunately it was just a bit meh.  Components were quite tired, and we needed a fair few hints, most of which resulted in us just going 'but why would you do that'.

I think this is my favourite game so far (ever).  The theming is very well done, and it's just really good fun.  The puzzles were the right amount of annoying!

Only minor quibble is that we did manage to irretrievably lose a component that meant we had to be given the solution to that puzzle, although I imagine they've addressed that since we did the room.

Honestly, we played this with too many of us.  Do it either with a small team, or inexperienced players.  We're relatively experienced, and there are lots of parallel puzzles.  I don't remember how long we took but our host appeared breathless at the door 30 seconds after we escaped as he hadn't quite paid attention and didn't expect us to finish so fast!

As a guide, we turned up exactly on the dot of when we should have but somehow still missed the communal briefing with all the other teams.  Then after we got out, we had our victory photo, a nice chat with out host, a bit of a wait while they worked out if there were any free slots for other puzzles later in the week (they try to sell you a reduced rate voucher for another game afterwards, but as we were only around for a week there was no point if we couldn't use it), chatted some more, and still didn't see a single other person (we could hear them!) before leaving.

This room's a little more straightforward than their other room.  We still enjoyed it, but as experienced solvers, I think we'd prefer something meatier.

Enjoyed this room; played it simultaneously with another group of friends and we were out first so the host let us watch them mwahahaha.

Really enjoyed this room.  A good mix of thinking vs doing puzzles, and some requiring teamwork.

Was dreadful.  The lobby and setup was so well done, I had high hopes.  Then we were shown into basically an empty room with no evidence that it was done by the same company that themed the outside so well.  The puzzles were rnothing to write home about.

Hint Hunt run two different games out of the submarine room.  We found this room quite frustrating because of this.  Red herrings and diversions are one thing, and part of the puzzle experience, but things that were genuinely puzzle parts but for a completely different game arc became annoying.  There is a part of the game which requires physical dexterity in a confined space which really should have been designed to be larger - only one member of our group of 6 was physically able to do this due to space constraints.