The Temple Of The Abyss

This was a really fun room in the mechanical style of the earlier escape rooms that were passion projects for privately owned escape room companies. That’s not a knock against it at all. I really enjoyed the creativity that went into each of the puzzles. My only gripe is that the room is quite dark. We were warned multiple times about that. A dark room is rarely my go to escape room experience—mainly because my partner and I are jumpy people and the darkness puts us on edge but also because it’s not a fun way to add difficulty to a room. We just really wanted to do this room based on reviews. Despite not being a fan of the darkness, I would absolutely recommend this escape room. While I wouldn’t say that it was groundbreaking, it was still a really solid escape room and that’s not easy to come by. We thoroughly enjoyed it.

Once you’ve played enough escape room, many games fall into tropes and standardized formats. A temple game is a common enough theme, usually including run books, substitution ciphers, lasers, etc. Temple of Abyss is a very unique temple game in terms of gameplay. It utilizes some of these cliches, but it also subverts them. A run book only provides a few structural clues, the environment is dark, and the inputs are highly novel. In particular, I loved one early device that was fun to manipulate and highly thematic in its design. Observation was key as well as interesting connections - some of the ways the game unfolded were highly unusual. Furthermore, Temple of Abyss had a great structure, utilizing repetition in its inputs in a somewhat simple yet satisfying way. It wasn’t super challenging or set focused - it was undeniably a passion project with novel interactions. Despite this, I liked the small set based flourishes. The game clock and a delivery mechanism stood out. Overall, this is a great game if you’re in the area!

Second time here and it doesn’t disappoint!