The Game: The Lost City

The Game had two escape rooms available, of which only one is playable by a team of two – although I’d probably have picked Lost City anyway. because the promo pictures looked pretty. Those pictures were not misleading – it has some lovely jungle decor and visually was probably the most impressive of the dozen games we tried in the region.

Even so, in all honesty I was pretty much ready to write this game off after the first fifteen minutes or so. One reason for that was a puzzle that relied on something I’d class very much as outside knowledge; most teams might between them have the relevant information, or failing that be able to get to the answer by a process of elimination and guesswork, but our first reaction was to assume we shouldn’t attempt it yet because an escape room wouldn’t expect you to know that information.

Additionally, the venue uses coloured padlocks for puzzles that have nothing to do with colour, or, worse, that use colour in a way that looks like it relates to the padlock colours but doesn’t. (I don’t consider that a spoiler, more of an important warning to make it more likely you’ll enjoy this game.)

Those two factors combined to pretty much destroy my faith in the game early on. The third thing that we struggled with was our utter inability to find anything. I could blame that on the elaborate, somewhat dimly lit environment, which we were treating with kid gloves so as not to damage anything, but really it was on our truly terrible search skills.

As the game continued I found I was enjoying it considerably more. Several of the later puzzles seemed patchy to me while we were solving them – but after the game, on seeing a couple of clues that we’d missed due to, yes, yet more search fails, I realised they’d actually been entirely reasonable.

Two small tweaks (replacing all the coloured padlocks with non-coloured locks, and adding some reference information for the outside knowledge puzzle) would instantly improve Lost City a great deal, and would make it a game I’d be happy to recommend. It would still have several puzzles with minor ambiguities, of the sort where you end up trying two or three different answers before finding one that works, but only to a minor degree that wouldn’t particularly bother me.

If you like elaborate sets, then Lost City is worth considering as a game to play while in Skopje. Just be warned that you might find the start in particular a bit bumpy – bear with it and you should find it an enjoyable game.