Inglourious Basterds: Spring of 45 (Door Z, Prague)

You have to tip your hat to “Inglourious Basterds: Spring of 45”. Not only have the creators behind this escape room dared to recreate the plotline of a World War II prisoner-of-war movie – they also succeed in this seemingly impossible task. To a large extent, at least.

The idea behind “Spring of 45” has absolutely nothing to do with Quentin Tarantino’s counterfactual World War II film (2009). There are no hints or references to neither the film nor Tarantino’s gratuitous violence or humour. In fact, “Spring of 45” is a family friendly if still adventurous escape room. The setup may actually be the scariest thing about the whole room: You play allied soldiers who have been taken by the Nazis and locked up in a shed. You will be executed at dawn, and therefore you have to escape into the woods while there’s still time. And not just escape: Along the way you have to blow up the Nazi headquarters. And like most of the beloved classic WW2 movies, this escape room is probably not historically correct in any way – but it sure is a lot of fun.

Set decoration: 7,3 points

You start the “Spring of 45” escape room enveloped in darkness. Then the lights come on and you find yourself locked up in a tiny shed made of solid wooden planks. And no door! The lights are dimmed, and old discarded stuff fill up the shelves on the walls and the floor space. You can actually smell the wood, and in the distance you can hear soldiers fighting, shooting and screaming. This is a great way to start the story and get immersed in the story and the setting.

As you venture forward into the plot, the set design gets a little less impressive. You never feel that you stand in a real forest, but Door Z (the people behind “Spring of 45”) have made a decent attempt with a couple of tree trunks on the cramped 8 m². It’s a difficult setting to create, and the solution here is most of all cute. Other creative solutions work far better. They involve lighting effects and TV screens functioning as windows – both of which open up the space of the escape room and underline the war theme. The room is also well designed in the way that it integrates various antique knick-knacks in the puzzles. This creates cohesion, which leads to immersion in the game play.

Still, the set design of “Spring of 45” isn’t perfect – it’s actually pretty easy to make the game even more immersive. For instance: They should turn up the volume of the sound effects to make it sound like there’s a war right around the corner. When we played the room, all the shooting and shouting was nearly drowned out by the Mission: Impossible theme music playing in the other game room. And then there’s the huge explosion towards the end of the game – where did that one go?

Puzzles: 8,8 points

Where as many escape rooms are constructed as a Freudian maze where you constantly have to unlock yet another box or open the door to a secret room or solve a riddle to reveal something hidden – “Spring of 45” is nearly the opposite. This escape room is constructed as an action-adventure computer game: You have to move forward, and you have to do things. Of course, you still have to unlock some doors, and find secret codes to deal with a couple of padlocks, but it’s not to solve some secret mystery. Your main goal is to escape from the claws of the Nazis and blow them to pieces in the end. This means that the game is very straightforward and linear: You have to move from room to room – from the shed to the forest and so on. So, once you get moving, the next door – the next challenge actually – is easy to spot.

This makes the game fun and action-packed. The 12-13 puzzles themselves are varied and involve a lot of physical activity and fiddling around with the set decorations. Light and sound play a crucial role during the game, as do German airplanes and an old accordion initially found in the wooden shed. You have to collaborate on some of the more inventive riddles, and you also have to search high and low for different details and clues, but it never becomes a chore of finding the needle in the haystack. In all fairness, there’s something for everyone in this room. 

Overall, due to the linearity of the game, there’s a nice flow in “Spring of 45”. This just underlines the sense of adventure and action, and you are quickly absorbed in the gameplay despite the set design.

Game Master: 4,8 points

Our game master was kind and forthcoming, but not very good at English. In fact, it was quite impossible to strike up a conversation with the poor guy before and after the game. However, during the game he was alert and responded to our three hint requests. Communication via text and a screen is not an option, but here it wasn’t a problem because we played the game pretty much on our own. Still, it’s annoying to ask – and ask again – about the deadline: There’s no clock or countdown timer in the game.

As with many other game rooms in Prague the hint system here also relied on the use of walkie-talkies – which doesn’t work very well with the game. It simply breaks the illusion of the World War II theme. Door Z should really come up with a creative solution that could go well with the 1945 setting – an old wireless perhaps and messages from our allied friends and fellow spies in Germany. Perhaps that could also incorporate the missing timer somehow. That would be a great improvement, but – again – we didn’t really need the hints, so we didn’t get all that annoyed with the walkie-talkie solution.

Conclusion: 7,0 points

If you forget about the missing connection to Inglourious Basterds and just play “Spring of 45” as a World War II-inspired escape game, it’s quite fun and adventurous, and works well with the whole family. The set design is pretty good, but it’s the inventive and diverse puzzles that provide most of the immersion in the gameplay.

Data:

Room: Inglourious Basterds: Spring of 45

Company: Door Z, Václavské nám. 837/11, 110 00 Praha 1-Nové Město

Website: http://www.doorz.eu

Languages available: Czech and English (beware the language barrier)

Game time: 60 minutes

Price: CZK 1590,- for the entire team (2-6 players)

This review:

Game date: 11 July 2017

Number of players: 2 (Door Z suggests that you are 2-6 players, but we wouldn’t recommend more than 3 players due to the size of each room)

Hints: 3

We survived, 52 minutes played

Ocean’s 12: Monaco Heist (Door Z, Prague)

“Ocean’s Twelve: Monaco Heist” (the escape room) is loosely based on Steven Soderbergh’s film, Ocean’s Twelve (2004) with George Clooney, Brad Pitt and a number of other famous Hollywood actors. That doesn’t mean that the game is all that glamorous, unfortunately. It may be about a billion-dollar heist, but it feels very mundane. No, actually the link to the film is most obvious in the second part of the gameplay where the room opens up to a small and claustrophobic laser labyrinth that must be scaled in order to win. And it’s tough and near impossible. This is not a spoiler – it’s a disclaimer!

We get back to the lasers later in this review, since they took up at least 20 minutes of our game. Meanwhile, the setup to “Monaco Heist” is pretty straightforward: There’s a rich billionaire living in Monaco. He has a diamond. You need money. You go steal it. You have an hour to do so. Then the billionaire will return. It’s as barebones as it’s immoral, and the room could really do with more of a backstory to be discovered along the way. That would actually have been pretty simple and made your criminal objective more relatable.

Set decoration: 6,0 points

It’s a funny thing that Door Z, the company behind “Monaco Heist”, have pinned this escape room on the Ocean’s franchise. The casino theme is nearly forgotten, the owner of the room – the billionaire – doesn’t come off as a billionaire, and there are no diamonds or other expensive stuff lying around. What we have here is an escape room clearly made by somebody who fell in love with the Belgian surrealist artist, Rene Magritte – he’s the guy with “This is not a pipe” painting, the grey business men falling from the sky, the giant apples, and lots of other famous paintings and sculptures. And first and foremost, this escape room plays homage to Magritte – many of his paintings cover the walls together with photos, masks and paintings by other artists. Which is all pretty neat – who doesn’t love a Magritte painting?

However, since the paintings are of course reproductions, the room doesn’t come off as being particularly opulent or lavish. There’s no champagne, no yachts, no glamour. It’s neither realistic nor immersive for that matter. However, it feels quite small because it is quite small, with no windows opening up to the French vistas apparently lying outside – remember, it’s called “Monaco Heist”. It’s never perfectly clear what room in the house, the game is set in: It doesn’t come off as a library. It doesn’t come off as a lounge. Or an office. Or a living room. It was just pretty white and covered with Magritte paintings. In this way, it just served as an escape-game room. But a quite bland one. Your heist is accompanied by some jazzy lounge-like music, but unfortunately there were technical issues with the loudspeakers which made parts of the music sound tinny and almost like Morse code.

Puzzles: 6,0 points

The first part of “Monaco Heist” feels most like an escape game. The puzzles continue to pay homage to Magritte and the visual arts: You have to use your eyes and discover the true meaning of the photos and the paintings in a variety of ways. It’s quite creative and there’s a good flow in the game in this section. But then again: This doesn’t go very well with the whole heist/casino theme. There’s also a huge puzzle around midway through where you have to build something, which has very little to do with either Rene Magritte or Ocean’s Twelve. In this way, you could say that the puzzles are both fun and playful, but they’re also very inconsistent.

The hands-down most time-consuming puzzle of them all is in fact not really a puzzle, but a physical obstacle race. You open up to a small room crisscrossed with at least 20 laser beams that you need to manoeuver through in order to win. This laser labyrinth becomes almost a game in the game – a physical challenge that will make you feel like a king if you manage to get all the way through it and finish the proper game. And you can do it over and over, again and again, because you can switch off the alarm that sounds every time you touch a laser beam. So, it could actually be quite a fun thing to put inside an escape room, right? Make people let out their inner Tom Cruise. Right?

However, here are the problems: This is a nearly impossible challenge for big people – and that’s “big” in any sense of the word: fat, robust, buff, tall, long-limbed, 12-week pregnant. People with long hair, too. We also include people with baggy and loose clothes – the same kind of clothes you would normally wear in an escape room.

Actually, it’s quite a shame, because taken at its face value the laser labyrinth is fun! It’s challenging and it’s playful. It’s like playing a real-life action game rather than the real-life adventure game we are used to in escape rooms. But not when the laser labyrinth takes at least 20 minutes to accomplish and replaces maybe five creative and fun puzzles. Then the laser game within the escape game becomes a very lazy gameplay solution.

Game Master: 4,5 points

Our game master was both kind and forthcoming, but with no talent for the English language. There was a real and somewhat annoying language barrier between him and us, especially because we had to communicate through walkie-talkies in the game. This meant that the few hints we were served during the game had to be repeated several times, and at times we just gave up trying to understand the poor guy. Furthermore, there were no hints in writing to help him and us along the way. We were completely dependent on communication through speech and walkies. And here, in this particular game session, that just didn’t work very well, which is a problem when the game is advertised as being available in English.

The whole walkie-talkie communication could actually have added an extra degree of immersion to the game, had our game master been better at English and pretended to be part of the heist: He could have played the guy in the van, scouring the blue prints of the billionaire’s house for hints for us. That could have been fun, but it was a missed opportunity here.

Conclusion: 5,5 points

Overall, “Ocean’s Twelve: Monaco Heist” is a pretty inconsistent game with a handful of playful puzzles topped off with a frustrating, difficult laser labyrinth. Despite the many Magritte paintings, this escape game doesn’t feel the slightest bit surreal, but rather a little flat and mediocre.

Data:

Room: Ocean’s Twelve: Monaco Heist

Company: Door Z, Václavské nám. 837/11, 110 00 Praha 1-Nové Město

Website: http://www.doorz.eu

Languages available: Czech and English (beware the language barrier)

Game time: 60 minutes

Price: CZK 1590,- for the entire team (2-6 players)

This review:

Game date: 11 July 2017

Number of players: 2 (Door Z suggests that you are 2-6 players, but we wouldn’t recommend more than 3 players due to the size of the rooms, and be sure to bring at least a skinny athlete along!)

Hints: 2-3

We survived, 59 minutes played

Faust (Enigma, Prague)

“Faust” is a different take on the escape-room genre than we’ve encountered before. Rather than discovering the story, the puzzles, and the space yourself, you are guided through the whole thing by the titular character of Faust speaking to you from the beyond. Interestingly, in some ways it actually works quite well, but then in others it falls flat to the ground.

The setup to “Faust” is pretty straight forward, although some of the narrative problems start right here: Faust is dead, but his soul is caught in limbo, due to his actions when he was alive. Put simply, he has done something unforgivable, and now God wants to punish him. Your job then is quite an awkward one: You have to save Faust from eternal punishment, while simultaneously uncovering his sins. So, in a way, you help a criminal get away with his crimes, even though they seem to be extremely mundane. The name of Faust might lead you to expect pacts with the Devil, satanic rites and a proper, horror-inspired room. In that case, “Faust” the escape room will never deliver since it focuses on Faust’s simple and somewhat silly love affair with a woman named Margaret.

Set decoration: 6,0 points

The “Faust” escape room is decently decorated. It aims high for the secluded rooms of a priest or a mage – maybe inside an old tower of a castle or a church. There is an array of knickknacks and cobwebs in the corners. The designers have even tried to create a couple of religious stained-glass windows, and they’ve drawn some rune-like letters around the walls of the rooms as well. The lights are dimmed and they will change throughout the game in order to guide your attention and make sure you stay on the strict narrative path you have to follow. All of which is well done.

However, this is also all there is to the room. It never opens itself up to further investigation, beyond the puzzles within these four walls. In fact, you could argue that much of the creators’ attention to detail has gone to the more mechanical and electrical puzzles and obviously the video projections of Faust, who appears inside some kind of mirror in the middle of the room. It’s actually quite spooky when you see him in the very beginning, because he speaks with a deep voice and looks transparent like a ghost. The whole idea that he is following us and guiding us from beyond is actually not bad. But as the game progresses, Faust becomes annoying due to several factors: 1) Faust controls the story, the plot, the puzzle solving. 2) Thereby he ends up controlling your entire experience of the room, making sure that any sense of immersion and accomplishment goes out the window. 3) He’s not good at English: We actually ended up ignoring several of the projections because we couldn’t understand what he said. 4) He is a projection, and the projector is standing inside the room, both clearly visible and very noisy.

Puzzles: 8,3 points

If the set design is just okay, the big puzzles are certainly more varied and fun to deal with, mainly due to the aforementioned technical solutions that have been fed into the game. The different puzzles in “Faust” are linearly designed around Faust’s continued plot narration: According to himself, he will take you on a journey through five chapters of his life – in the end it turned out to be actually just one chapter divided into five sections. But these sections are all constructed around a row of puzzles that have to be solved. After the accomplishment of each of these sections you are rewarded with a “magical stone” that has to be inserted into a pentagram, five stones in total.

In this way, the linearity both drives the plot forward and makes “Faust” an escape room for beginners. Also, because there’s a nice progression in the puzzles – they start pretty simple and end up being more complex, if also somewhat incoherent. The best thing about “Faust” is perhaps the variation: They involve religious references, sound and music, water and moving the furniture around. There are of course also a fair number of padlocks and keys to be found, and there are also more school-like chores to be dealt with. Overall, the gameplay feels playful – it’s always fun to feel the insides of a device click into gear and then look up to find out what was activated in the room. 

Still, by having a pre-recorded actor telling you the story, telling you all about the room, guiding you from puzzle to puzzle – that’s actually a very lazy and easy way to construct a game. And the sense of adventure is hard to obtain for the involved players.

Game Master: 3,5 points

The number-one problem in the “Faust” game room was the language barrier we encountered. First of all, the entire game hinges on the actor playing Faust: He tells the story, he creates the plot, and he gives the hints – almost non-stop during the entire 60-minute gameplay. On the one hand, it ends up being very annoying, and on the other hand you are entirely dependent on this technical gimmick. So, it has to work – obviously – and here it simply does not. The actor’s English skills were so poor that we basically gave up following the story as well as the hints. We really longed for some subtitles or at least just the clues in writing, none of which was to be found in “Faust”.

Unfortunately, our game master outside the room didn’t do much better. She was able to see us, and she communicated with us through the pre-recorded lines spoken by Faust, while we were playing. However, as a game master and a hostess, she was extremely shy – to a degree where she was unable to welcome us or say goodbye. She quickly disappeared behind a wall or behind a counter, avoiding eye contact, staring into some papers, and looking like this was her worst day of her life.  

To be fair: These language issues are probably non-existent in the Czech version of the game: If we had been fluent in Czech and had played “Faust” in Czech, as well, it would probably have made a lot more sense.

Conclusion: 5,9 points

So, in the end, “Faust” is an attempt at making a different kind of escape-room game. The problem is that the driving idea about a pre-recorded actor directing everything in the game doesn’t work very well. Yet, the string of puzzles is a nicely mixed bag – containing a handful of fun electrical riddles. The Faustian over- and undertones are, however, sadly missing.

Data:

Room: Faust

Company: Enigma, Svornosti 888/18, 150 00 Praha 5 – Smíchov

Website: http://www.enigmaprague.cz

Languages available: Czech and English (but we can’t recommend playing it in English)

Game time: 60 minutes

Price: CZK 1200,- for the entire team (2-5 players)

This review:

Game date: 11 July 2017

Number of players: 2 (Enigma suggests that you are 2-5 players, but we wouldn’t recommend more than 3 players due to the size of the room)

Hints: All the way through due to the technics of the room!

We survived, 52 minutes played