Flucht Aus Der Anstalt [Escape From The Institution]

My wife and I have about 30 rooms of experience and wanted to do one on a rainy vacation day in Interlaken. We picked "Flucht aus der Anstalt". Production value was not great, but also common for this price point. Which is to say the experience isn't very immersive—you feel like you're in an apartment in Interlaken, not a mental hospital. The puzzles are mostly just okay. Some of them we thought were very unintuitive. (Confusing or misleading riddles.) The main issue we had was with our game master. There was a bit of a language barrier. Our game master wasn't very confident in her English. I can understand that's tricky, but I felt like it made her very shy and hesitant to speak with us. The room also had no kind of clue system—the game master would just come in the room and talk to us if we needed help. So it was that when we got stuck (on poorly designed puzzles) she would just come into the room, tell us something not especially helpful, and dip back out. In at least two cases she gave us a clue for something we had already figured out. For example, we had solved the code for a lock, but the lock was just a bit jammed. She came in and said something that had us thinking the code wasn't meant for the lock when she left. In one case she told us not to worry about one puzzle. Not sure why. I wish we had understood her discomfort and the clue system earlier. I would have been more forceful with showing her what we had done and held on to her longer to make sure we were on the right path. I wouldn't entirely recommend against this place. I think if I were to do a second room with the same gamemaster, knowing what I do now, it would have been passable.