Valencia, Jan 2025
The distinctive name of this escape room had caught my attention back when it first got a TERPECA award – and of course winning the award was a strong recommendation for it too. For that reason we booked it as the second of two rooms to play on our brief visit to the city, and only afterwards realised that both games we were playing in Valencia were themed as robberies.
In this one you’re stealing from an Asian mafia group, based out of a Chinese restaurant. Full details of our mission arrived a few hours before the game start time, written in-character to set the scene. That was only the beginning of the ways in which this game aims to be immersive; avoiding spoilers, it has a highly memorable start, and if you find yourself confused on arrival then it doesn’t mean something has gone wrong.
It combines immersive realism in places with puzzle solving entirely in the style you may be used to from escape rooms, and I found the transition a little jarring in places, switching abruptly from playing along with a dramatic situation to (say) arranging objects in a particular order, and other things that would be nonsensical outside an escape room. But that’s just a matter of recognising when the game expects you to shift gear.
Un Golpe Perfecto is an expansive and impressive blend of puzzles and drama. It uses its 90 minutes game time to the full, taking you through a series of distinctive and interesting phases. It’s obvious why it won a TERPECA award. My enjoyment of the experience was dented by several things though, first and foremost by having only one slightly wonky torch between the two of us. It was not so dark, but it was dark enough to want torchlight at almost every step, and having to share the torch was an entirely unnecessary cramp on enjoying the gameplay, which would have been far worse with more people.
There were other small things. The hint system via a phone was a realistic but clunky way to communicate with our host, particularly when it kept autocorrecting my English words into Spanish ones. The audio was a little on the loud side, a couple of mechanisms seemed slow to trigger after we’d completed the relevant puzzle, one puzzle was unfriendly to anyone who struggles with colours in low light. There seemed to be a couple of ghost puzzles, where clues had been left in the room but were not used. None of those were as great an annoyance as the lack of a second torch, but all contributed to a sense that it was hard to enjoy the room as much as it deserved.
And this is certainly a game that should be enjoyed. From the start it throws surprises at you, and has plenty of original or clever ideas for you to deal with, right through to the high energy finish. Our host, who was a much more integral part of this game than he would be in most others, performed with gusto. There were a dozen different things that I loved in the drama, the setup, the set and the puzzles.
I certainly found this game frustrating at various points, and engaged with it less as a result. Conversely, it’s to the room’s credit that it was able to win me over to a considerable degree nonetheless. I came out having enjoyed a lot of it, though still with the sense of it not having lived up to its potential. So I recommend it, with qualifications: if you’re in Valencia then it’s an obvious choice to play and deservedly so, just be warned that the experience may not flow as smoothly as you’d expect from a room as highly decorated as this one. 
