Athens, Apr 2023
The sheer variety of horror rooms available in Athens – and so many top-rated! – is a little overwhelming, and it’s not easy to decide which to play. Wake Up is a fear experience that I thought excelled in some ways (even against Athens’ high standards) but was weaker in others.
It starts off strong on the immersion, with some memorably cool scenes; some of the effects and ideas here make it immediately clear you’re dealing with a first rate game. In Athens it’s easy to get blasé about the size of the games, but this is a huge complex space that will take you through a journey where you lose any sense of the outside world.
And of course the space is populated. There are three different modes you can play in, with helpful spirits, with hostile spirits but easier puzzles, or hostile spirits and all the puzzles; we chose the third. And the spirits certainly put plenty of effort into scaring us.
Without any slight intended on the actors, Wake Up primarily used the simple scare tactic of surprise screaming, which is to fear what the pratfall is to comedy; it’s straightforward and effective, but can quickly get tiresome. After a while, we found that we were just patiently waiting for the performance section to finish so that we could resume play again.
It may also just have been that we were playing it late at night after a non-stop day of other first class horror rooms, dulling its impact. There was much to rave about, including some very clever messing with our sense of where we were, and an interaction sequence that was a lot more memorable than jump-and-scream. By any objective measure, this is a horror room you should absolutely play; if you’re selecting between the best that Athens has to offer, then choose this if you like your scares frequent and loud. 
