Norwich, Jan 2026
The (currently) newest game at Cryptic Escape is a fantasy adventure, pitting you against a dragon – although with the extra challenge that your weapons have been stolen, and you’ll need to recover them to win. This is very much a Dungeons & Dragons theme, where you’re nominally a team of warrior, wizard, and so on. In theory, if you played with a large enough team, I imagine you could actually assign a specific character to each player, but that’s not something the game itself does. However, the heroic adventuring party is a motif used in various ways through several of the puzzles, and adds colour to the setting.
I found the physical setting atmospheric and a good complement to the game content, building up to a cool reveal at the end. I might nitpick small details of some of the puzzles as feeling a little bit arbitrary in their logic at times, but nothing seemed too grating. My biggest criticism is that quite a few puzzles felt like off-the-shelf components plugged into the game, so it seemed sometimes like a room containing disconnected puzzles more than an integrated experience. But conversely, the components were high quality as well as varied and often interesting. And I particularly liked the way the room built up to the big final puzzle, bringing earlier elements together in a satisfying and thematic way as a cerebral version of an end-boss battle, or something like the final meta in a puzzle hunt.
Cryptic has evolved since the first time I played one of their games, years ago, when it felt like they were almost hoping players would fail, as if difficulty were correlated to quality; they have a much friendlier approach to customer satisfaction these days. That doesn’t mean their rooms are easy, though now the difficulty comes primarily from there being quite a bit to get through, plus the occasional trickier step. There would definitely be less time pressure if you divide and conquer efficiently. Either way, this is one of their best-looking rooms so far, and almost certainly their most varied and entertaining offering; if you’re choosing something in Norwich, this is a top pick. 
