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Reviews

Reviews

Haunting at Haruka High

Haunting at Haruka High

Omescape - Sunnyvale

  • Escape room
  • IRL
A fun room, but not as strong as Chaos or Robotopia. Really strong special effects which gave us a few good frights! But the time controls were frustrating: the room has a 30% success rate, but no visible clock (you had to check the time on the walkie-talkie), many long cut scenes you have to sit through, and some goofy time-consuming player interactions. We escaped with seconds to spare; we would have been really sad to have failed and missed the finale. I think the game would be better if it let everyone "win" (e.g. like the story-based rooms in Spain or Montreal). I usually enjoy narrative in games, but this one felt like a chore: a couple of the "puzzles" felt like they were just testing us on our understanding of some exposition we'd just heard.
The Apartment Nextdoor - A Dark Experience

The Apartment Nextdoor - A Dark Experience

Omescape - Sunnyvale

  • Escape room
  • IRL
A fun and spooky ghost story. No jump scares. Unlike the other (two) dark rooms I've done, you'll need to find/manipulate some small objects (e.g. keys); fumbling/dropping them could be frustrating. The audio is important but was a little hard to make out in a few places. Another audio issue we had was that the hints from the GM were difficult to hear because they sometimes came from a different room. Afterwards, we got a look at the rooms with the lights on, and they were completely different from how we imagined them!
DragonBorn: El Hijo del Posadero [DragonBorn: The Innkeeper's Son]

DragonBorn: El Hijo del Posadero [DragonBorn: The Innkeeper's Son]

DragonBorn Escape Room

  • Escape room
  • IRL
Clearly a must-play: we loved the NPC interaction throughout the game, the storyline was compelling, and the jaw-dropping sets delivered surprise after surprise. Many of the puzzles were wonderfully crafted physical puzzles, some of which required cooperation. Others involved really fun role-playing with the NPCs. And yet it bothered me that there were so many combination locks throughout the game (more than one time the GM would tell us "Right code, wrong lock!"), as well as a standard-issue hotel safe with a piece of paper taped next to it to make the code more interesting; at times it felt like we were playing a gen-1 game.
Noche de Perros [Night of Dogs]

Noche de Perros [Night of Dogs]

Distrito 7

  • Escape room
  • IRL
We like rooms with unusual themes, and we enjoyed Distrito 7 in Pamplona very much. It works hard (maybe too hard) to have a coherent plot line. It starts off in a realistic-looking bar in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Manhattan, other rooms in the game also have a realistic feel (you can see one of them on their website). Many of the puzzles suffer from the weird logic peculiar to escape rooms but were still quite fun. Afterwards, the GM told us that their goal was to make ordinary items seem surprising; I think they succeeded. It's a 90-minute game and feels like a lot of content; as a team of 2 we felt a little exhausted by the end. There are multiple rooms in the game, but also multiple acts, with different objectives and moods. In addition to the GM helping us, there were some NPCs (human and otherwise). Most of the Spanish text had English translations taped over them and were fine, but we struggled with some of the recorded audio, some of which was in Spanish. There are some pretty easy physical challenges. The GM's English was fine, but he told us after the game that he had actually stopped working at that escape room company a couple of weeks ago, but they called him back just so he could be the GM for us in English.
Yucatán: El último Templo [Yucatan: The Last Temple]

Yucatán: El último Templo [Yucatan: The Last Temple]

Coco Room Zaragoza Paseo Rosales

  • Escape room
  • IRL
Yucatan in Zaragoza was yet another Mayan-themed room. A couple of interesting physical challenges and puzzles, but overall the set and the gameplay didn't really stand out for me. The GM's English was fine but she didn't play an NPC. The GM short-circuited a few puzzles for us because we were a little slow and/or only two people. There were several paragraphs of text on a parchment which were in Spanish, but my partner was able to figure it out (we neglected to ask if the lack of translation was just a mistake). This is a pet peeve of mine, but I feel like if you're going to build an ancient Mayan or Egyptian-themed room, you should try to remove at least the obvious anachronisms. Things like buttons and lights that look like they belong on a vending machine, or Allen wrenches taped to the end of an ancient-looking stick.
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