Belgrade, Mar 2020
The inventor Nikola Tesla is something of a national hero in Serbia – his face is on the 100 dinar note, Belgrade’s airport is named after him, and there’s a museum dedicated to his achievements. So it’s no surprise that there are multiple escape rooms themed after him. Adrenaline’s room is one I’d noticed recommendations for, and so had hoped to be impressed; but while it had several very nice ideas, it broadly fell short of expectations.
According to the theme you’re inside the mind of the great man. In practice this translated to a relatively simple space with maths formulae all over the walls and a mostly abstract set of puzzles to solve.
If there was one thing that put me off this game, it was a large dexterity task early on that turned into a massive bottleneck, since only one person at a time could attempt it. In its defence it’s both cool and well suited to the theme, and in fact we could have progressed some other areas of the room in parallel to it, had we realised. Even so, I’ve seen too many other versions of the same thing for it to have any novelty value, and it’s an intrinsically frustrating type of task; and since it took well over ten minutes of tedious retries to get past it, it didn’t get things off to a very good start.
I also was unimpressed by the game’s end. Concluding a game with a puzzle that’s more complex and challenging than the rest is not a bad idea. The one in Tesla just had a bit too much ambiguity between different ways to approach it – multiple ways to combine different numbers and different ways to use those numbers, with the intended approach being no more plausible than half a dozen others.
That combination of a frustrating start and an unsatisfying finish did the game no favours. However, in between there was a lot to enjoy. Although there’s no plot to speak of, they take the theme of electricity and use it for a playful and imaginative variety of puzzles, with much that’s physical or unusual or hands-on. It feels fairly old-fashioned by current escape room standards, but probably seemed very innovative and impressive when first built. Even so, unless you’re playing a large number of games in Belgrade, there are better options available. 
