Hoi An, Nov 2024
I’d thought that all the escape rooms in Hoi An had closed during the pandemic, but we found an exception or perhaps a newer addition. My hopes weren’t high though, because this is a single room being run downstairs in a hostel style hotel, as one of a range of activities to entertain the backpackers and tourists staying there. But we paid for a game, and hung out at their bar ping pong table while the staff set the game up, and it turned out to be definitely more impressive than I’d expected – the escape room that is, not the ping pong table.
They’ve matched their theme to the space they had available, so you’re escaping from a basement, though a more ominous and gory basement than is likely for the real world location under a sunny hotel. There was a perfunctory back story about people disappearing, though it was not easy to follow.
Visually, my first impression was that the room looked fine if a little sparse. As the game continued it got noticeably more impressive, for the effort put into the decor and also for the size of the space. I think there was even an attempt at a story that unfurled as we went on, not just a sequence of themed puzzles, and although I remained a bit unsure what that story was it was still nice to have the impression of a narrative.
Like the previous game we played, and like several others in Asia, there were only seven puzzles, to be solved in strict linear order. However, the content felt far more substantial here than in the previous one, and it took us close to an hour to finish instead of twenty minutes. That wasn’t always for the right sort of reasons. One puzzle was a nice idea implemented in a slightly ambiguous way; there were other moments where the logic felt a little wooly, or the tech was slow to trigger.
Even so, this comfortably exceeeded my initial (low) expectations, with atmosphere and with the way it developed through to the ending. It’s bumpy in places but still worth giving a go if you’re passing through Hoi An and feel like a quick bit of escaping. 
