Seoul, Sep 2024
My experience of this game was that it was simultaneously spectacular, and spectacularly bad. It combines very cool set design on a pretty large scale, with puzzles that varied between tedious and flawed.
Like the other Seoul room we played, hints were provided via a tablet: you enter a four letter code and you get a canned hint for that puzzle.
Seoul Escape Room (who confusingly also have a site in Busan) have ‘seasons’ where a set of games forms a linked narrative. However, the connections to the other games in this season seemed fairly cursory, and it worked perfectly well as a stand-alone game; or rather, where it didn’t work that wasn’t because of narrative dependencies. In this one you have crash-landed in the Amazon, and surviving will also involve finding the lost city that you came here for.
A jungle is an ambitious theme to build, and they’ve done a great job of pulling that off. It’s fairly dark, naturally, but manages to be both pretty and atmospheric, and it’s easy to embrace the role of jungle adventurer. Navigating the room is often really quite physical, especially during the obvious centrepiece section, and there’s a strong wow factor that could leave you enthusing about the game for some time to come.
With that going for it, it could get away with having very average puzzles and still come out ahead. But after leaving I listed the game’s puzzles and struggled to find more than one or two that I’d actually enjoyed. There was plenty of translating ciphers in inadequate light, some cryptic riddles where we mostly just guessed the answer, counting, and so on. The atmospheric audio made it near impossible to communicate with our softly spoken host over the walkie talkie, who seemed not too interested in our game anyhow. The big end puzzle could have made up for a lot, but a couple of ambiguities in how to interpret it left us flailing with solutions that seemed entirely correct but which didn’t work. Even the coolest thing in the room ended up being a somewhat unpleasant trial instead of a thrill, due to maintenance issues.
Your mileage may vary, and if you focus on the indisputably impressive set dressing then the game could make a strong positive impression on you. Even so, my experience was mainly of frustration and eventual disengagement, and I’m rating it higher than I otherwise would because of the objectively cool elements involved. 
