Katowice, Sep 2023
Located in a shopping centre out by the Katowice Załęże station on the west side of the city, Mystical Machinery have seven escape rooms and a laser tag arena; when we visited, the lobby was full of excited children with plastic guns. They also have a few board games and a bar area, which was good for a post-escape game of Carcassonne once the laser melee had quietened down.
We chose Tesla’s Lab mostly at random. In this room you’re trying to repair Tesla’s radio so as to receive a cross-Atlantic transmission from him; the workshop has been sabotaged by his rival Edison.
Atmospheric without being dingy, and full of brass pipes and interesting electrical gadgets, this Lab has an engaging steampunk feel. The electric theme runs through both set and puzzle design, with a good level of physicality.
One early puzzle required the ability to read Polish; fortunately we had a native speaker with us. I imagine if you didn’t they’d help you past it.
For us the flow felt a bit bumpy, though that was partly because of something we missed near the start; although we managed to continue anyhow, that made that sequence of puzzles seem less logical than it was. The ending also seemed to not work properly, with turned out to be because the items needed to be placed a certain way and we’d thought they needed to be placed the other way up. At those points and a couple of others the signposting could have been tweaked, but the puzzle logic did make sense at least in retrospect.
Fixing a radio might not sound like the most thrilling premise for an escape room, but one of the satisfying things about this game is the way it all comes together to a final multi-piece task, in a way that feels meaningful within the narrative, not just solving puzzles until you run out of them. If you’re in Katowice then this is a solid steampunk room for a quick puzzle fix. 
