Singapore, Oct 2022
Castiglione is not a terrible game, but it is showing its age, and even if in mint condition would still have flaws. The name refers to Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian sculptor who worked in the Imperial Chinese court in the 19th Century, making a set of 12 bronze heads for the Zodiac animals. These heads were lost in the Opium Wars, and it’s your task to recover them.
We were shown into the room after an intro video – also, bizarrely, after being scanned by a metal detector wand, perhaps to make sure we weren’t smuggling in screwdrivers and lockpicks? Our host ran through the usual game rules, and gave us each a torch, both of which were thankfully bright and reliable. Low lighting and bookshelf-patterned wallpaper set the atmosphere.
It’s a linear structure where each time you solve one puzzle, you receive something needed for the next. The puzzles are mostly linked to the theme, though there’s little narrative; in fact we appeared to have achieved our aim partway through, after which there were some further puzzles, then when we were trying to work out how to continue the host came in to tell us we’d completed it.
Castiglione has been open quite a few years, and time has taken a toll. Yellow and black tape was used to mark out of bounds items such as the air conditioning unit, but also parts of the scenery that had previously been roughly handled; there were a couple of plaintive signs added asking players not to pull on some of the more obviously abused items. It all felt a little fragile and tired.
The majority of the puzzles were logical, using a variety of technologies, all of which worked smoothly (although in a couple of cases triggered something to open before we’d entirely finished placing the relevant items). There were two steps that struck me as questionable: one very arbitrary solution that could get a team stuck early on, and one where the audio feedback seemed misleading, giving what seemed to be a victory chime when the puzzle hadn’t yet been solved.
I’d heard that Singapore‘s escape room scene had largely stagnated over the last few years, and this sample of one is consistent with that: it seemed like it would have been a reasonably strong room in 2015, still open and patched up where needed to keep it running some years later. One advantage that it did have was price: playing as a pair on a weekday daytime, it was noticeably cheaper than I’m used to paying for most games in Western Europe. 
