Bad Steben, Feb 2025
Dream Labs recommend playing Heartless Pirate first and Metropolis after, without specifying a reason for that. Having done them in the opposite order due to availability constraints, I agree with their advice – because not even a game as impressive as Heartless Pirate can avoid being put in the shade by Metropolis.
Your induction into this pirate adventure uses the same framing device of lucid dreaming induction, which didn’t have quite the same impact the second time round but was still an outstandingly clever setup for an escape room, and they varied enough details to keep the sequence fresh.
Where Metropolis gives you gritty sci-fi drama, Heartless Pirate has a much more light-hearted, tongue in cheek style. It’s knowingly ironic and self-referential, a genre-aware style of satire that throws in deliberate anachronisms to poke fun at itself. It’s also more heavily interactive, with plenty of back and forth with a live actor – for comedy and as part of the puzzles, not for scares.
There were a few ways in which Heartless Pirate didn’t quite land for me. One was the use of the live actor, where I found it confusing to tell when we were being told we couldn’t do something as a way to tell us: you need to solve the puzzle of how to get around this constraint; versus just being told we couldn’t do it. The sequence had lots of great ideas but felt a little muddled, which might be due to playing in English not German. Another was a communication-based puzzle where communicating seemed unnecessary difficult via the equipment provided, made still harder by the ambient audio; and lastly, it just felt a bit on the short side.
That said, I suspect I’d still have been completely blown away by Heartless Pirate if I hadn’t just come from Metropolis. That it’s gorgeous to look at goes without saying. It also presents you with a series of puzzles that almost completely eschew typical escape room logic in favour of ideas that are more reminiscent of classic point ‘n’ click computer games – Monkey Island is the obvious point of comparison – where solutions are creatively out-of-the-box and often comical in the way you solve it or the results when you do.
So yes, this is a wildly original and cool game that deserves its reputation and is entirely worth what may be a complicated journey to Bad Steben, particularly if like us you get there by public transport. It’s a game with an unusually prominent amount of actor interaction, which will appeal to some players more than others, but even if that puts you off you shouldn’t miss it. And yes, when you visit you should play it first not second. Did I mention how great Metropolis is? 
