Morgue

This is a very original room. It's for a single person only and there are two copies of it next to each other, so that you can compete with your friend. It is also 30 minutes only. At the time it was also a TERPECA finalist. All of that was very appealing to me and I was really eager to play it.

First impression after walking into the venue was really confusing. On the right there was some large and very loud corporate party, on the left there was a counter with barman ready to prepare variety of drinks from his rich bar. After a moment of confusion one lady came to us and asked whether we are here to play an escape room and we went through the briefing in the bar area standing next to a very small table. A small leaderboard with photos and best times from each room could have been seen on the right of the counter. After that weird beginning we proceeded to cross the large room with corporate party and entered the area which finally started looking like an escape room venue. I was afraid that we are gonna hear the loud party throughout the whole game what would ruin any immersion completely, but fortunately game rooms were well sound isolated and I couldn't hear a thing, so that turned out to not be a problem.

The idea for this game is very cool, I think that such format is very attractive and has high potential. In some way the room was well built, looked cool etc., however because of some reasons we didn't have such a good time as we have wished for. In my room I had one malfunction. Just one, but that was a crucial one what really lead to a ridiculously bad, frustrating and completely turning off situation. An action that was supposed to take 10 second took me 5-10 minutes of ridiculous manual labour. Imagine that you are put into a high pressure rivalry-oriented game with a very strict time limit and you need to start it by trying to inflate a balloon that has a hole in it for 10 minutes. That's how I felt more or less. Rest of the game was fortunately quite good and I had good fun apart from that malfunctioning part.
However, after I got out I learnt that the room of my friend was broken even more. The malfunctioning part I talked about was broken even more in his copy and required GMs assisstance. And in addition to that he also got ~3 other things that were broken for him in other parts of the game. Having 4 malfunctions (and one quite critical one that was broken in both rooms) in a room that has ~6 puzzles in it is unacceptable and as much as I would really like to recommend this room (because it is a very original concept and the production quality is solid as well), I simply can't. We were not offered any kind of refund or discount as well which I believe we deserved as never before. This could have been 8/10 had anything worked properly, but I can give it at most 6/10 in such state.

In my rating scale that I decided to adapt (1-horrible, 2-ok, possibly flawed, 3-good, worth doing, 4-very good, 5-extraordinary) I grade this at:
Set design, production value: 3
Puzzles: 3
Something original: 5
Did I have fun?: 3