Barcelona, Jan 2025
I went into KONG with high expectations – not only is it in the current TERPECA top 10 (!) but the most recent game before it from Escape Barcelona, Cybercity 2049, remains among my personal all time favourites. Plus there’s the name – does “KONG” refer to King Kong? How can that possibly work as an escape room theme?
It is of course a cold start, and hits the ground running straightaway, with a dramatic build up that sets the tone and establishes the ground rules: that yes, there will be live interaction, and how you should deal with it. This is something of a motif for this company’s rooms. Each of their more recent creations seems to involve some type of actor interaction, and in each one the rules of engagement are different. Crucially, in each it’s made clear how you’re expected to handle it. While these elements could certainly be scary for some groups, this degree of structure makes the interactions more like physically active mini games embedded within the escape room.
Something about the layout of the game space – perhaps just the fact that you move back and forth through the central areas more – meant it felt not quite so vast as Cybercity; I had a fair idea of where things where and where the outside was, rather than being entirely lost in a subterranean world. But make no mistake, this is another very large game space, and it’s elaborately themed throughout, with a great deal of dynamic lighting and audio effects layered on.
This is another Barcelona room where the puzzles are good but probably not going to be what you’re talking about after you’ve finished the game. There’s quite a lot of interaction with computers and screens and buttons, which is entirely in keeping with the set and all well designed, but may not be to everyone’s taste nonetheless.
As for what you will be talking about afterwards – well, it’s hard to narrow it down. There are half a dozen or more sequences that would be the big special moment in any normal escape room, involving action, exploration, suspense, and more; and I’m going to have to stick to vague abstracts to avoid spoilers. In the scene which most players will consider the big climax, they start with an idea I’ve seen in a number of other rooms but amp it up to an entirely different level. My favourite moment though was earlier on, a more open-ended cross between interaction and puzzle, set up in a way that gave it both pathos and comedy.
KONG is a gigantic beast of a game full of cool, memorable and even extraordinary moments. Obviously you should make strenuous efforts to play it – your tastes might run to something more puzzle-centric, or calmer in tone, but even if so this is probably not a game you’ll want to miss out on seeing. On its own it’s worth a trip to Barcelona; and doubly so since it’s right there in the same building as its equally remarkable sister game Cybercity. 
