Open The Door: Escape from the Black Castle

This room is not only just "inspired" by the series Game of Thrones but clearly a Game of Thrones experience as you are taken on a journey from Castle Rock to the final battle against the White Walkers. The story explains that you are made prisoners as suspected of treason and you are led into the room with a hood on your head and quickly handcuffed to the wall. This is not mentioned when booking the room and might worry some players, but there is a safety key next to you in case you are feeling unwell. There is also a red button in each room in case of emergency, so there is no worries to be had here.

The puzzles throughout the game are really impressive as they are all keeping you in theme with a really convincing background audio. We were slow to start our game as the first key to get us started was hidden around a prop that wasn't directly part of the theme/game, which confused us for a looong time, so long that we needed a hint for it. It's worth mentioning that the game offers different difficulty levels, we went for "advanced" so we can't really judge how well the medium difficulty but it seemed really interesting as the game was giving you hints after a certain amount of time spent on a puzzle. In the advance difficulty, we were asking for clues manually, and the host would give us a clue which in some ways broke the immersion a bit.

The overall flow of the game worked quite well from the beginning to the end with the game leading you through the story without losing you at any point, you know what you are doing and why you are doing it. There was just a moment that broke the fluidity of the game as after a certain amount of time, a crow will send you a message sent by an ally, this crow arrived while we were resolving a puzzle so we thought that this crow was the direct reward from that puzzle. This event is really smart and immersive but due to this unfortunate timing in our game, it mislead us in thinking that we were done with the puzzle we were working on.

The final room is very effective as well as it doesn't contain any cerebral puzzles but only fast pace actions that gives you that feeling of attack and urgency, even though the sound effect could be louder, that will remind you of Game of Thrones.

If you are a fan of Game of Thrones, you are in for a TREAT! There is everything to make you feel like a die-hard fan, and having the Game of Thrones knowledge would definitely be an advantage for this room! You want to play the room but don't have any specific knowledge in the series? No worries, the game is built as such that you might not be as fast as the fans, but you will still be able to enjoy yourself. Highly recommend if you are over Galway! 🙂