Baku, Jun 2024
This was the latest in a series of rooms I tried at random in countries not normally known for escape rooms. Baku does have several companies, but Portal Games is comfortably the largest, with around a dozen different locations, and over thirty games, most listed as available in three languages – though the majority of those are horror themes, and I was doubtful how many actual puzzles those contained.
Magic Lamp was clearly a non-horror theme, though as it turned out it did have an actor. Since he didn’t speak English, our host also came into the room, and with played with the two of them watching and often prompting us as we went along.
With an ‘Arabian Nights’ soundtrack, moody lighting, multiple rooms and some nice-looking props, this could have turned out to be an enjoyable game. The biggest reason that it wasn’t was that every single step of the game was flawed or broken in some way. This varied from a puzzle where colour was important, presented under red light so you couldn’t distinguish the colours; to a couple of ghost puzzles where the clues were never used; to a ‘count the overlapping shapes’ puzzle where one of the answers was just wrong.
Our two hosts were friendly across the language barrier, though their presence there in the room felt a little intrusive at times. They were sometimes overly quick to hint, or outright tell us to do things; sometimes they’d tell us to do something that turned out to be impossible until they eventually intervened to trigger something.
I’m sure this would flow better for fluent speakers of Russian or Azerbaijani. There’d only have been the one host, and his role might have been more effective; I think he was intended to be a trickster / genie sort of figure, though for us that was mostly lost in translation.
We didn’t have a horrible time; we fairly quickly adjusted our expectations to match what we were getting, and enjoyed it for what it was. However, that’s not a recommendation. I don’t know if this room is representative of the (many) other games run by this company, let alone by the other companies in Baku; but it didn’t leave me enthused to try more to find out. 
