On Saturday 18th of January the full Team Black Rose got together again (yay!) to play one of our long awaited rooms: The new one from Time Maze. We saw Adventure Rooms also has a couple of rooms in the area so hey, why not!
The forbidden city 1901 – Time Maze 9/10
Die Verbotene Stadt 1901 Time Maze Baden
Time Maze’s second room follows in the first room’s footsteps in terms of immersion, hard work and massive love to detail. We had been looking forward to playing this room for a while and did not get disappointed! So much magic going on, and all invisible to the player. This was like the bottle of wine that we were saving waiting for it to be opened at the right time. đ·
Oh boy, another Sherlock room. Let’s see. This Sherlock is set in the modern times. A classical start that leaves you handcuffed for no reason. Technically, you are being convicted for a crime you didn’t commit – but you’ll have to prove it! Fine. The experience makes you walk through quite a bunch of distinct settings starting in a metro station. Personally, I found that cool, the sets are clearly distinct and don’t overstay their welcome. That being said, some are better polished than others. Our group had mixed feelings about the room, thus the not-so-good final score.
Lost Circus – Adventure Rooms 5/10
Clowning around
You start locked in a prison that has an open lock, for safety regulations. You are told to imagine it’s locked and to get out when you get the key. Well, when you get the key it doesn’t even match the lock so you can start making that imagination work. This already starts me with the wrong foot. If you don’t have a better workaround for being locked, please find an alternative start… The problem is we had to keep our imagination going. The first 2 meter long dexterity puzzle was pre-solved because it was broken. “Don’t worry we solved it for you because it doesn’t work”.
This room has many aspects of it to be improved and it has a decent narrative and a memorable ending. Maybe if you play it far in the future, the issues are fixed.
Turns out you didnât book an escape room, you booked a stay in the room where the very Aunt Hilda used to stay. This escape room begins with a warm welcome in the Grand Trip Trap Hotel by a polite doorman, that tells you a story very similar to the following blurb.
Nobody knows Aunt Hilda’s real name. Everyone at the Grand Trip Trap Hotel has always called her so. And it is “Aunt Hilda”, that she wrote on the register in 1837. First resident of the Grand Trip Trap Hotel, it is there that she has imagined her most beautiful tales, turning her room into a wonderful world inhabited with marvelous characters.
Lay back and relax, because the intro takes a while and you are about to experience one of those wow moments you wonât easily forget.
Legends say that Aunt Hilda always told a new story to the ones willing to listen. As the blurb suggests, if you pay attention you will be brought into her world. Youâll get as immersed as you did when you vividly lived a story as kid when listening to adult storytellers. You are brought into a new world, with a stellar production and objects that belong in the era. No non-sense âwalkie-talkiesâ nor unnecessary magnets.
Diegesis in its pure form, beautiful riddles at a comfortable pace will have you do tasks that not only fit the theme well, but with a slight suspension of disbelief from your side, you will undoubtedly feel like a character from the story.
The worst part? It ends. Had I had known we were so close to the end, we would have stalled, observed the set for minutes and waited until the very last moment. They donât do the best job at advertising it, thereâs no photo-finish, an odd name and no preview picture yet it seems to always be fully booked.
I was fortunate enough to be able to play 128 rooms in 2019 and, without a doubt, Aunt Hilda was my favorite room of the year. The craziest part? I played it on the 28th of December, barely making it into 2019. Recency bias? Perhaps. This room is a masterpiece. Congratulations to Trip Trap for making it to the top 31 TERPECA.
The swiss escape room scene in Switzerland is split between German and French speaking areas. This time, we stayed on the German side and we traveled one hour by train to the capital of Switzerland! Will it also take the title as the capital city of escape rooms in Switzerland? Keep reading to find out! This time, half of Black Rose (Dominique and Enric) played together with Ayah and Maxime from SwissKnife.
Games we played
Death chamber (Totenkammer) at Roomexit.ch
Game of Stones, theescape.ch
Tresor, Adventure Rooms
Virus, Adventure Rooms
Chernobyl (Tschernobyl), Adventure Rooms
Orient Express, Adventure Rooms
Roomexit.ch
Death Chamber 6/10
The death chamber is located right next to an actual cemetery. In keeping with the theme, the room transports you into an old burial ground, where a famous archaeologist disappeared some time ago. Following his tracks, we made our way through the room. The experience was a bit of a bumpy one since we did not find a necessary part of the puzzle early on and started half-solving the rest of the room before we were actually able to do so. Once we found the missing piece, we were able to progress quickly. All in all, the room has nice decorations but the puzzles are rather on the easy side.
Time: 44 minutes
The Escape Bern
Game of Stones 3/10
Why do we get in berserker mode as soon as we hold weapon replicas?
This room felt like a bag of chips. You hope to have it all but then you open it just to realize it’s mostly air. Out of all their rooms, we booked this one purely based on the theme and the website plot. It’s a very short game. It’s a storm of parallel riddles that require very little communication, and each of them is in a different corner of the room. My initial hype was crushed when entering the room as soon as I saw a coat of arms that looked like a children had drawn it. The coolest thing is the iron throne which sells well for a photo finish.
Time: 22 minutes
Adventure Rooms Bern
Tresor (Safe) 7/10
This room is advertised as “very hard” and only for experts. Hard? Sure. But more than anything long. Go here full stamina after a shot of espresso because it keeps on going. Classical defuse the bomb before it explodes in 1 hour. Think about cliche settings: office? a lab? locker room? You name it. The setting was a bit classic, yet it kept us busy and our brain burning all the time. Close to no downtime with a lot of things to do.
The GM waited for us in the end with her hands on her head, telling us that now 7 groups had escaped before us, a 1% escape rate so far, all with a handful of seconds left and… we had finished in 42 minutes! Cool, feeldgoodman, but this started the storm. Apparently she spread the news on the super-secret GM WhatsApp and from there on it was high expectations after high expectations. “Wow you will do this room in 10min!”. Really, we’re here to have fun together not to prove anything. On the plus side, on all the rooms we played after this, the GMs were very nice and friendly to us! Thanks Marina, Jasmin, Maya, aaand a last name we forgot (sorry!). Good job!
Time: 42 minutes (Record!)
Virus 5/10
Virus is a room that is situated inside the bowels of the Historical Museum in Bern. It seems, that its rooms were once part of an exhibition but were now re-purposed for the escape room experience – including many taxidermied animals following your every move. The room made use of some cool real-time technology and we were specifically amazed by one specific puzzle near the end that we hadn’t seen anywhere else. Apart form that, the difficulty level and immersion is quite on par with other AdventureRooms.
Time: 30 minutes
Chernobyl 7.5/10
AdventureRooms’ Bern latest room (Aug 2019). An intro that starts with a bit of a show. Awesome, our GM was very motivated and that already sets the right mood when going into a room. The room is very mathy, whereas it can be a turn on for me, it can be tedious to others. No need to add numbers in your head, but some elementary Leibnizian knowledge will be necessary. Highly specialized measuring devices, spray-painted props and a transition from more analytical puzzles to more hands-on and scientific measuring.
Time: 38 minutes
Orient Express 7/10
The first thing to mention about this room has to be its beautiful decoration. Once inside, one really gets the feeling of being in the old fashioned Orient Express. Out of all the rooms we played this day, this was probably the easiest when it comes to riddles but the one we wanted to stay in the longest. We got very stuck with searching – again – but otherwise progressed quickly and with ease. Nothing really out of the ordinary but still worth a visit.
We went on this trip before we started the blog. We don’t have reviews for all the rooms but you can see a quick Hamburg guide in case you travel there and want to play games! Scroll down to see the full list and our top recommendations!
We got da loot!
Hamburg escape room recommendations (shortlist)
Skurrilum (2): ernie hudson wailing lady + zoo
Hidden in Hamburg (2) Neptun’s curse + Master of time.
Adventure Team (2): Countdown to Meltdown + Time Doctor.
Team Breakout(1): 2141 the world’s future
TeamEscape (1): Sweet revenge.
Deadline escape (1): Gold mine.
Recommendations in depth
Skurrilum you can play all of them, but if you are tight on schedule the must plays are the two games from Ernie Hudson (crying lady + zoo of death). The second one is scary-themed but not horror. There’s an adult themed one that it’s fun if you like the theme and you have spare time, but not a great room.
Hidden in Hamburg has two locations, the ones we liked the most and would recommend are Neptun’s curse, Master of Time. In this order. The forbidden game is a horror game. If you really don’t like horror, skip it. Other games weren’t that great.
From Adventure team I really liked Countdown to Meltdown (was my 100th room!), it had some cool parts. Time Doctor was cool too, it’s “different” and has a good climatic ending if you like hectic moments.
From TeamEscape we liked Sweet Revenge because it was a bit of murder mystery on top of an escape rooms. Good if you like that. As an escape room, not a big deal.
Team Breakout‘s 2141 the world’s future / white mission was really cool, original idea. Inspired a lot of post-game chatting.
Gold mine from deadline escape was great. Their other games nothing super cool that I remember, but you may as well play since they are a bit far.
Other rooms that you can play but I wouldn’t recommend before the other ones: – Fluchtweg (Voyager may be ok, but hotel las vegas not so great) – Escapeventure: They felt like 3 very average games. If you like science/lab themed maybe Eisenbarth is fun. – TeamEscape retrospectively I wish we didn’t play all of them. Avoid the scary one, the smell/ventilation was really bad.
NOTE: This article is work in progress, we will update it with detailed reviews and more pics as soon as we can!
This was our first Enthusiast escape trip. Before that, in Barcelona we just happened to play some rooms, but this one we planned mainly to go play top escape rooms!
I think this is my favorite pic from the trip đ
We played a very humble 15 rooms, when playing more than 3 rooms per day was forbidden and this is the result of the combined rating.
NOTE: This article is work in progress, we will update it with detailed reviews and more pics as soon as we can! We played other rooms in BCN on separate trips, check them out on https://www.teamblackrose.com/played-rooms/
We need to write about this, this is how we got hooked! We went for some tourism holidays given that Enric grew up there, and we managed to sneak 2-3 escape rooms per day. Note that before this trip, we had played only 14 escape rooms! We effectively doubled!
It was meant to be upside down, but gravity makes no sense whatsoever.
We played the following games during Dec 28th and Dec 29th 2019. I was flying back from my Christmas stay in Barcelona, and quickly landed, went home and got again in a 3h train from ZĂŒrich to Geneva. Next thing I knew after I woke early in the morning (who books rooms at 9am!) is that I was playing the best escape room in Switzerland. Keep reading for more!
NOTE: THIS ARTICLE NEEDS TO BE FINISHED! Reviews for the following games will be added to this or separate pages.
