Marbella, Feb 2023
At present, Marbella has exactly one escape room company, with a single room, and it’s a rather charming fairy tale theme. The title refers to the story of Hansel and Gretel, and you’re returning to the gingerbread house to defeat the witch who appears to still be around and still kidnapping small children.
This version focuses more on the ‘witch’ decor than the ‘house made from candy’ concept. If considering it as a family choice, note that it’s quite dark in places, potentially a little scary for kids at one point and has a slightly gruesome element at another. However, their website states that adaptations are possible for younger players, so I suspect they’ll adjust it accordingly as long as you let them know in advance that you’re playing with children.
In most respects Breadcrumbs is a delightful room. I thought it could improve its signposting, in that there were a couple of points where it seemed like the game was prompting us to do one thing where we actually needed to do something else first. For us the bigger frustration was that our host showered us with hints, even after we’d asked her to hold back, undermining much of the joy of solving; the language barrier was definitely a factor there.
Despite that, it was easy to be won over by the game. In appearance and play style it has a homespun feel that suggests plenty of care and love have gone into building it. All the components seemed high quality; no plastic slabs here for written content, instead hand-drawn illustrations that added atmosphere without distracting from the clues. While there’s plenty of traditional padlock codes to solve, it also weaves in more immersive or lightly dramatic moments; technology is used in ways that enhance the setting not just for the sake of it.
There is an optional side quest: there are six small plastic mice to find (children transformed by the witch). On finishing the game’s last puzzle we stubbornly refused to exit for five minutes until we had to finally concede defeat in finding the final mouse; but it’s a nice addition to the game that means no-one should be stuck without something to do, since they can always search some more.
Sweet with some dark edges, Breadcumbs is a distinctive room that’s definitely worth catching if you’re in the area – though before you begin it might be worth discussing with your host how frequently you want to receive hints. 
