Prague, Aug 2023
The escape room industry is always advancing and becoming more sophisticated, so there’s little place for nostalgia, no golden age to look back to, when the cutting edge just keeps improving. Even so, Úsvit Cinema struck me as showcasing several virtues that I enjoyed in early escape rooms that a lot of modern, superficially more sophisticated, games have lost.
For a start, it appeared to be somewhere deep inside a large old building, through which we were guided by our host, who seemed to be the owner and designer. Once inside, although there were actually a great many electronic mechanisms behind the scenes, it looked very retro and realistic, a set built out of wood not plastic, with nothing that felt mass-produced.
Cinema is a puzzle game not a scary game. Despite that, I thought the setup managed to be more genuinely creepy than the intros to some full-on horror rooms, and that gave a frisson of nerves that lasted throughout the puzzle-solving frenzy.
But it’s the puzzles that are the main focus of this game, and they’re served in a very non-linear fashion. I often find that the drawback to non-linear games is if you get stuck on multiple puzzles at once, and it becomes dispiriting to finally solve something and it doesn’t advance you at all. But here there was an excellent balance, where there were always multiple things to work on, and some unlocked other puzzles while others were endpoints; each time we weren’t sure how to solve something we could switch to a different puzzle and return to it with new inspiration a little later on.
Also, I felt that the game was designed with a passion for both escape rooms and also cinema. Film buffs will spot several references to the early years of the movie industry, and these are used for some highly distinctive puzzle ideas. We did think we’d hit a dead end with one of these, a cool idea that we just couldn’t do – but when pushed to try it again in what turned out to be the correct way, I found it worked for me after all.
You’ll likely find Cinema / Kino Úsvit less superficially flashy than a lot of top-rated games. But it felt designed with dedication, intelligence, and a deft touch, and for me it achieved more immersion and enjoyment that many rooms created with a higher budget. 
