Kauai Escape Rooms: Curse of the Tiki Lounge

The bad news is that you’re unlikely to get to play this game: we played by livestream in the last few days before it was due to be torn down, with the owners vacating the premises to concentrate on their puzzles-by-post product. That’s doubly a shame because Tiki Lounge was amongst my favourites of the remote play games I’ve tried so far.

The company is based in Hawaii, and the location inspires the theming: you’re in the kind of tiki bar where you might very well choose to relax while on a Hawaiian holiday. In the story your job is to investigate a series of missing person cases, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this is some kind of grim detective noir – as a game, Tiki Lounge is as colourful and cheerful as a Hawaiian shirt.

The game seems more or less unmodified from its in-person form, and since that’s a busy game with lots to do in parallel, it could have been a tricky one to play remotely – a design intended for 4-8 players may not work well when playing via the bottleneck of a camera feed. Two things kept that from being a problem. Firstly, our avatar wasn’t slow to give us gentle steers in the right direction, for instance with the camera angle, in a way that stopped us from wasting time without feeling intrusive. And secondly, it uses the Telescape inventory system, which really is the smoothest such system I’ve seen yet, with the killer feature of being able to see what your teammates are looking at. (I’d still like an easier way to view two different items side by side, mind you.)

In a host of ways it felt like a friendly room, from the several quick wins to get you started to the colourful decor. (In fact, the lighting might have been too colourful for certain puzzles, though having a host who knows what colours items are supposed to be removes a lot of the potential friction there.) The best moments were however towards the end, and I’m not going to spoil them just in case this game is ever resurrected in any form. But it was silly in the best of ways and also stood out for a cute trick that went well beyond anything similar I’ve seen elsewhere.

It’s a game with plenty of codes and padlocks, but also several snazzier tricks, and even some narrative progression. I would definitely have preferred to play in person (and not solely because that would mean I’d be in Hawaii!), but the remote game still managed to be a barrel of fun. It’s energetic and relentlessly enjoyable, well-designed and well-run, a game I’d wholeheartedly recommend – if it were still available!