Escapology Santiago: Los Mineros

English-friendly games in Chile are a rarity, but Escapology is a franchise of a large US chain, and so set up slightly better for international players, with three of their rooms officially playable in English. In practice that meant that all written items in the game were in two languages, though everything else was in Spanish: welcome, briefing, story and hints. So there may be aspects of the plot that I didn’t catch, though I believe it’s based on the real-life disaster in 2010 where Chilean miners were trapped by a cave-in.

It gave a good impression, with a space that you wouldn’t mistake for being an actual underground tunnel but which created the right ambience nonetheless. Some of the later decor seemed a bit haphazard – partly in a ‘collapsed mine’ way but also partly in a ‘thrown together on a tight budget’ way, with opportunities to injure ourselves that made me wish I’d worn the hard hat provided.

I enjoyed the puzzles, with one glaring exception. An early puzzle also felt a bit weak, in the way it involved just spotting numbers and using them out of context as a lock code; but on reflection, that was a pretty common puzzle back around 2017, and I remember considering them to be reasonable at that time.

The ‘puzzle’ that was unarguably dreadful was probably due to breakage. With that one there was no way to solve it except by being told by the host to ignore half of it and to use trial and error on the rest. It was pretty clear that there had once been a proper puzzle there, and when the hardware failed they just kept going using manual interaction to push players through it anyway. Our host justified to it us afterwards as ‘that’s what makes the room difficult!’.

Leaving aside that flagrant crime against all principles of good escape room design, I was (mostly) pleasantly surprised by the rest of the game. It’s quite lock-based, with several clues provided as laminated paper, and definitely on the easy side for experienced players, but we were having a thoroughly fun time with it until we hit the brick wall of the hopelessly broken puzzle. At least the host didn’t leave us to flail on it too long before intervening.