Sofia, May 2024
We’d missed Kryptos on our first visit to Sofia six years earlier, and almost missed it this time too, but managed to find time for a trip to it before leaving, and were thoroughly glad we’d done so. On booking we had to choose between ‘normal’ and ‘hard’ mode, and chose the latter; as we discovered later, the difference is that a couple of the puzzles are presented in trickier versions, with less to clue you what to do.
Kryptos is the name of a real-life sculpture that exists at the CIA headquarters, with four encoded messages, one of which has still not been successfully decoded. That provides inspiration for what is a mostly abstract theme of code breaking and puzzle solving, where the decor style is based around bold geometric shapes and coloured lighting. The deceptive simplicity of the design reminded me of the various implementations of the White Room concept, with an escape room that appears to be a featureless blank cube; though this one is striking in a different and more colourful way. It shares with that concept a complete lack of padlocks, using instead buttons and lights and sensors for interaction.
Our host told us three keywords during the intro – these are not just colour, and are worth remembering, though all but maybe one puzzle is solvable even if you don’t.
What I really liked about Kryptos could easily be a source of frustration for another group – which is the degree to which it was based around observation, something I’m normally reliably bad at. In the non-linear puzzle structure, it felt like we kept approaching the point of being frustratingly stuck – only to have a breakthrough, then another. Few games have given me such a succession of eureka moments, since the days when I was still new to escape rooms.
The stripped-back space gives you relatively few things to consider as possible sources of information, and when you spot a subtle detail or twig how apparently unrelated things connect to each other, it’s very rewarding.
That could go the other way – if your brain isn’t jumping in the right direction, it could turn into a dispiriting experience, including at the very first step. But the puzzle logic is consistently very sound, and it’s worth persisting beyond the point you might normally ask for a hint – and remembering to look carefully at everything.
There are bigger and more immersive rooms available, with more story or more high tech effects; but for a slick, challenging puzzle game Kryptos really hit the spot, and for me captured much of the thrill that I found in escape rooms when I first started playing them. 
