Escape the Review

These days it’s extremely rare that I get a chance to play and review a home escape game. So it was beautifully fortuitous that when such a chance actually came up, it was for a game by PostCurious, creators of one of my all-time favourite box games (The Emerald Flame). And I realise I’m late to the party in discovering this, but The Morrison Game Factory is in the same elite tier of exquisitely crafted puzzle experiences.

This is a physical box game, though played with a significant online com...

I’d heard of this game before playing it, but not here; the original version is in Osaka, and this is apparently an official and faithful reproduction of that one. Escape Portal’s website states that they will be opening other such licensed copies of acclaimed escape rooms from other parts of the globe, so I’m curious to see what else they bring to Bangkok in the future.

But for now, Shadow Zen is the only room at the venue, and reflects its origins in the Japanese theming. You’re in 1920s Japa...

There are almost no escape rooms available to play on Mauritius; currently it sees to be just Turtle Rush in the north, and a company called Dodo Quest that may still run games for the public inside one of the resorts on the southern coast. Getting to Turtle Quest’s location by public transport was quite a mission, and finding our way inside was a challenge also, and it would give me great pleasure to say that the game was entirely worth it - but sadly, I can’t.

This heist game started us off w...

Having played and loved Logiccastle’s newest and longest room, we went back a week later to play their second-newest and second-longest room. This one has a spy story where you’re infiltrating the control centre for an orbital weapon that you need to destroy - but again, you can pretty much ignore the story and just dive into the solving.

007 is a little less linear than Immortal, with some opportunities to divide and conquer for faster progress, and it moves through distinct areas, each with a...

There were several venues that would have been easier to reach, while we were staying in Cyprus; getting to Logiccastle from Larnaca town involved a bus ride up to the suburb of Oroklini. But the 2.5hr game time intrigued me enough to try it, and I was thoroughly glad I did.

There is a story here, about a magician and a tragedy, though it didn’t seem to feature much after the intro video; and although there was a video to set the scene, the game start was a lot more involving and interesting th...

Over the years the games at Knockout have become steadily slicker and more sophisticated, but remained very much in the tradition of classic escape rooms. With the venue now operated by the team from Deadlocked, the latest game here is an abrupt turn in a much more experimental direction, a puzzle challenge that I suspect may soon be drawing enthusiasts to Reading to test their solving skills.

The Locktopus is set on a spaceship, on which you need to defeat the titular AI’s riddles to escape. T...

The (currently) newest game at Cryptic Escape is a fantasy adventure, pitting you against a dragon - although with the extra challenge that your weapons have been stolen, and you’ll need to recover them to win. This is very much a Dungeons & Dragons theme, where you’re nominally a team of warrior, wizard, and so on. In theory, if you played with a large enough team, I imagine you could actually assign a specific character to each player, but that’s not something the game itself does. However, th...

Occultus has grown since our previous visit back in 2017 - they now have a second building across the street, and a total of eight different rooms. Their Batman theme is their latest, which was reason enough for us to choose it; our mission was to find the Caped Crusader.

That theme was easy to forget about for the earlier section of the game, which could easily be presented as a completely different setting with no superhero elements at all. The beginning was also the most puzzle-centric part,...

Some countries have an established reputation for quality escape rooms; elsewhere it’s a lot more hit and miss, but Mexico City has quite a few companies, and it seemed plausible there could be some hidden gems to discover. And maybe there are - but this was not one of them.

Enigma Rooms is a large chain, running games in a dozen cities across the country and beyond. The room we chose is themed after The Hobbit, and that gives a charming bit of set design to start with, although one that may be...

After a great many companies in South America that offered games in Spanish only, or where the English language option was provided very imperfectly, it was a refreshing change to find that The Key has full support for running their rooms in English. That appears to be the case for some of the other escape venues in the city; but although there was no language barrier here, the game play didn’t leave us feeling like trying others.

We chose The Dragon’s Rescue mostly at random, and the story sum...

The first challenge when playing an escape room in Bogotá is that, at least at time of writing, none of them seem to be available in English. The second challenge was that the booking engine for the venue nearest us didn’t accept my overseas address, preventing online payment. So we just turned up at the venue and asked to play, and their Pirates game was the one they offered us.

I followed the game briefing as much by knowing what our host was likely to be saying as by actually understanding h...

We only had a chance to play one game in Boston, and it was an easy choice; The Storyteller’s Secret had been on my radar for some time due to its multiple TERPECA wins. The premise is that you’re entering the cabin of a famous writer in order to discover their secret - which in another game might have a grim twist, but here is the basis for a sweet and wholesome game, full of heart and charm.

The tone is set from the outset with whimsical and beautiful set dressing, further enhanced with atmos...

The thing about playing several Escaparium rooms in quick succession is that your standards adjust, and you come to take for granted the grand scale and extravagant effects that at any other time would leave your mouth agape. But then again, Forgotten Cathedral manages to be dramatic in a way that should still impress however jaded you’ve become by the time you get to it.

There’s quite a bit of back story to this game, but you’re introduced to it in a way that feels organic, as part of the setu...

Along with the various TERPECAs this room has won, it also deserves to win something for most original game description. Instead of any story, Escaparium’s website gives you an EBay-style advert - for a secondhand wardrobe, of course. If the mention of a wardrobe makes you think of Narnia, you’re not a million miles off - but this isn’t simply a room designed around the Narnia books, it’s a wholly original creation.

There’s certainly a similarity of style in this whimsical fantasy, which create...

I think I’ve now played at least half a dozen games set on a subway train, most of which used an actual refurbished subway train as the set, and I’m concluding that it’s far from my favourite setting. The familiarity of the surroundings is never as much of a thrill as you might expect, and the austere carriage environment tends to limit the puzzle ideas used - it’s not a coincidence that almost every such game splits its time between the train itself and some kind of external set.

All of...

I pretty reliably enjoy pirate-themed escape rooms; it’s a common theme and I’ve seen a wide variety of takes on the setting, from cheap and cheerful to wildly impressive. But playing Voodoo Queen makes me think of the M&S advertising tagline: this isn’t just a pirate game, this is an Escaparium pirate game.

It’s not easy to transport players from a Canadian warehouse to a Caribbean pirate ship, but a combination of acting, drama, effects and set building manages it brilliantly. This gam...

One of the big difficulties of reviewing escape rooms over a period of years is the degree to which they’ve changed. I remember games that struck me as outstanding ten years ago, but pretty ordinary a few years later, put in the shade by noticeably more sophisticated rooms - which were in turn overshadowed by later creations that reached an entirely different level of scale, drama, ingenuity. Giving a game a five star rating implies some degree of equivalence with the other rooms that got the sa...

This game is a sequel to Immersia’s Weekend at the Shack game, at their other branch; we hadn’t played that one but we cheerfully plunged into the sequel anyhow. At time of writing it’s also the company’s newest room, and was considerably larger in scale and game area than the others we played with them.

The premise is that, a decade after surviving an attack from a serial killer (the original game), one of your fellow survivors has found where the killer is imprisoned and wants you to help him...

Sometimes escape rooms give you a snippet of story or even a quick video to set the scene, as part of the confirmation email before you even reach the venue. Project RESET does this - and the video is over ten minutes long. When our host asked whether we knew what our mission was, she looked quite startled to find that we’d watched and absorbed it.

To summarise a complex premise, you are criminals in a future society undergoing a rehabilitation program designed to evaluate how well you learn fr...

One of two games that we played at Immersia that I’d describe as a concept room, Salutem Medicina might give the impression of being a scary asylum game with a psychotic doctor, or something or that sort. While there might be some overlap in the medical-inspired decor, this is a wholly different beast, and if it leaves you unnerved or unsettled it’s in a far more sophisticated way.

For some of the game it unsettled us in a less enjoyable way - in that I’d describe some of the puzzles as fitting...

Grand Immersia Hotel is a room that would have stood out to me far more if I’d played it on its own, rather than in the middle of a week’s binge of top Quebec games. Even within the same venue, games like Project RESET and Salutem Medicina Institute were smaller in scale, but were built around very distinctive and memorable concepts; whereas Hotel has to settle for being ‘only’ a dramatic, well-designed and exciting escape room.

As seems to be normal for the company, the drama began before the ...

The other room we played at Cabernet Mysteriis was a polar opposite in theme, from a fantastical child’s dream to a gritty post-apocalyptic wasteland reminiscent of Mad Max. But it was equally stylish and stylised, decorated with punk flare and a futuristic garage aesthetic, and got us in the mood not just with the interactive intro sequence, but the realisation that it had set up a cool take on a familiar type of puzzle.

Thinking back through the puzzles in each game, I can’t say that they’re ...

How’s this for a family-friendly theme: you are Dreamwalkers, tasked with entering the dreams of children and making sure their dreams are happy and peaceful. Well, although it sounds sweet and fluffy, this room involves some surprisingly gruesome and dark moments. You have three nightmares to defeat, and your antagonists aren’t messing around - they’ve already laid waste to this dream quite thoroughly.

Not that that puts us off; and this is a room with some really delightful touches. From the ...

I might have been humming the Terminator 2 theme music in the run-up to this room, but even the smallest bit of research into its them would have told me that there’s no connection or indeed similarity there; the name instead refers to justice in the sense of the judicial system. The website doesn’t give you much information about the story beforehand, so I won’t add details here; but you’re in a house that was the scene of a tragedy, working out what happened.

Over recent years I’ve noticed pe...

Eliviascape was a large part of the reason we came to Quebec City; we were thoroughly glad we did, since it’s a lovely city, though its charms are not quite so obvious in the area around the venue. The first of the two rooms we played here is intentionally mysterious about its theme, and because it’s deliberately abstract, that allows the designers a great deal of leeway to build in anything they like. There is a story, and an explanation for everything that happens in the game, but you m...

The other room that we played at SOS Adventures was La ConFéeserie, a game in which you’ve inherited a mysterious sweet shop and are setting out to run it as a business - although the English title of the game might give away some of further surprises in store.

This is a family-friendly theme built with verve and care. It looks charming from the outset; it’s a sweet concept (pun intended), whimsical and cute, with puzzles that build well on top of the theme and the idea of fulfilling people’s o...

If you’re booking escape rooms to play in and around Montreal, and you’re there on a Monday, you may find it difficult to find many games that are open. But if you can travel out to Sainte-Jerôme to north of the city, SOS Adventures are a rare exception, with both Monday availability and a good reputation.

Night of the Wolf and Serpent is inspired by Norse myths, where the titular creatures are Loki’s children, unleashed and at war with the gods, and you need to find Thor’s hammer Mjölnir to e...

Next Level are conveniently located in downtown Sydney; and since we were passing through the city very briefly, that was the reason we chose this game to play - well, that plus the TERPECA nomination.

Forest of Echoes is an escape room that doesn’t fit neatly into a standard genre, a game layered with story and different moods. The starting premise is that you’re in a wood which people have been known to enter and not leave again… but don’t read that as meaning that it’s a horror room. I’d act...

There are currently only two escape companies in Bali, and this is probably only going to be the more convenient one to get to if you’re staying on the eastern Sanur coast. It’s also not a standard commercial venue - the two games here are run by a conservation organisation, and are intended to raise awareness of marine conservation issues. We played their original, older room.

Given the theme, I was prepared for the educational room to turn out to be worthy but dull or poorly designed. With lo...

These days London is a bit of a quiet spot for new escape rooms, which makes this pop-up game from puzzle collective Dreamcat all the more exciting - though sadly I only managed to catch it near the end of its run, and I believe all slots for the few remaining days are now taken. This is in fact an amateur creation that’s free to play, with a suggested charity donation, built and run on a volunteer basis. Don’t assume from that that this is a Blu-Tack and string sort of construction knocked toge...

Dream Labs recommend playing Heartless Pirate first and Metropolis after, without specifying a reason for that. Having done them in the opposite order due to availability constraints, I agree with their advice - because not even a game as impressive as Heartless Pirate can avoid being put in the shade by Metropolis.

Your induction into this pirate adventure uses the same framing device of lucid dreaming induction, which didn’t have quite the same impact the second time round but was still an ou...

I think I’m generally quite reserved in my reviews of escape rooms, parsimonious with praise; even a very good game inspires a level of enthusiasm that’s muted by the near-thousand other rooms I’m comparing it to. With Metropolis I have the opposite problem, of not degenerating into a mess of superlatives and fan-boy incoherence - because, well, wow.

Bad Stepen isn’t particularly easy to get to, and is best reached by car. We went by public transport, and it took quite some time. It was ...

With my usual casualness about investigating games before booking them, I saw the German name for this one was ‘something Grab’, and immediately assumed it was an Egyptian theme or similar, since I’ve become used to seeing ‘Grab’ in the names of “Pharaoh’s Tomb” games and suchlike. And since I was there with some scare-averse teammates, I got a little concerned when our host led us (in character) to the ominous gates of a spooky graveyard. However, as the game’s description specifies, although t...

You may not be able to judge a book by its cover or an escape room venue by its lobby, but in this case the huge and beautiful entrance to Finest Escape’s Bamberg branch is an accurate indication of what’s to follow. The sheer amount of space they’ve lavished on their welcome area does not come at the expense of the game rooms - quite the opposite.

Your mission is to find the father of a certain adventurer named Lara, after he vanished in search of the secret of eternal life, somewhere in Sout...

Hidden in Hamburg have games on two different ships; Neptune’s Curse is set on the Rickmer Rickmers, which meant a brisk ten minute walk from the Cap San Diego where we played the previous one. This ship is a late-era sailing ship, over a century old, and it's worth taking a look around the museum areas while you’re there. But then again, the game itself gives you a good look at the ship, including areas where visitors holding only a normal museum ticket can’t access - because unlike the ...

Hidden in Hamburg are famously based not in a normal venue but on board a pair of ships, permanently moored at the docks. The Golden Skull is on the Cap San Diego, a retired cargo ship that is also a museum, entry to which is included in the price of the game. With such a distinctive and atmospheric venue, it was quite a surprise to realise that in The Golden Skull we were exploring a Mayan temple with no connection to the ocean whatsoever.

But almost as soon as we’d begun the game, we’d lost a...

Each of the three rooms we played at Big Break were thoroughly enjoyable, but The Toymaker was the one we’d come for, and it was indeed in a class of its own.

The premise is that you’re in the store and workshop of a legendary toymaker, who has devoted years to creating one specific toy. And that sets up the first delight of the game, which is an environment so packed with interesting things that I could have spent quarter or an hour or more just looking round and appreciating the decorations. ...

Time travel is often a mix and match sort of theme, and so it was here - essentially a sequence of mostly independent mini games, each with its own style of decor and puzzles. Given the whole of history to choose from, some designers go for more obvious time periods and some less obvious; the ones here are distinctive and mostly fairly original choices.

Your mission is to repair the damage caused by a previous time traveller, setting history back on course at each point of intervention; althoug...

This is a premise that at another venue could easily have been a horror room: plagued by insomnia, you undergo experimental therapy to enter your own dreamworld to defeat your inner demons, before you’re trapped there forever. But while this does have some darker edges to the theming, it’s a puzzle-led game in an atmospheric but not scary setting.

With a very smart beginning, Insomnia got off to a strong start and never really faltered. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that there are several...

This was a game that I booked primarily for logistical reasons, looking for something that I could squeeze into a small afternoon gap in a tight schedule of games. So I didn’t have particularly high hopes for it, particularly since Team Escape is a multi-city chain, which experience has taught me often means less impressive games. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable and stylish this room was.

The setup is that you’re making a routine visit to a power station, one that’s control...

Picture it: it’s your first day at work as an escape room host; the only escape rooms you’ve played before are the two you did as training for the job, you’re the only one there, lots of the tech is failing, and of all the teams that could be playing, you get us. So I’m sympathetic for the very nice young man who was clearly trying to do his best under difficult circumstances. But yes, the game as we experienced it was a hot mess.

Nakatomi Plaza is based on the movie Die Hard, in which a group ...