After having a multitude of showers, doing some laundry, and using up all of our hot water, we were ready for Day 3! Today all of our escapes were in Teressa, a city just outside of Barcelona.

If there was a theme of today, for me it would have been the joy of small reveals and….exhaustion…

I should say as well that we pretty much solidified that the long rooms we have played our ideally played with 4 vs our team of 6. However, we still had a lot of fun. Although I am tired…so tired…

Frizz Status:  well the constant climbing and crawling through escape rooms doesn’t help, that is for sure.

Tourist Trappings

I don’t think Barcelona enjoys our loud, boisterous conversations so early in the morning. It is always super quiet even at 9:30 AM and a couple of our escape hosts made mention of not waking up the neighbors with loud early morning noises. North Americans. We are a scourge.

Today we tried a Catalan treat, a panellet! They are sold for All Saints Day and are made with marzipan, chestnuts and pine nuts! They are so yummy!

I tried again to use my Spanish and managed to get through most of buying a sweatshirt (because I had packed poorly and was freezing), but then the cashier spoke a series of sentences very quickly and I immediately folded, using my “Lo siento, yo no hablo espanol o Catalan bien”. The cashier took pity on me and switched to some English.

Smoking is definitely more of a thing here.

The hills of Barcelona are slowly killing me. They are steep and they are loooooong. My feet are going to fall off.

We have struggled with how to get around the Barcelona area. Ordering a taxi through an app is possible, but mostly in Barcelona proper. Once you get to other areas like Terresa, forget using the app. You need to call a taxi in. And they might not feel great about having to drive you all the way back to Barcelona.

And now…the escapes…

Local Escape Trends

I am moving this section up because it makes more sense to talk about what I saw in every room rather than one, and that way I don’t have to repeat it in the individual rooms. Let’s start with…

Ladders: all of the rooms today had ladders. Spain, or at least Barcelona, love ladders. I wonder if this is because this is the best use of the space available. Regardless, I am learning to overcome my fear of vertigo.

Crawling: all escape rooms also had crawling. Barcelona loves crawling, but not padding, which my old lady knees are not big fans of.

Tools: the escape rooms often had us using real tools to get things done. These are weirdly effective at making me feel involved in the game.

Established IP: I think so far, all but one of our escapes are loosely based on other properties, including using similar music and images. Not a bad thing, just interesting.

City Escape

We did 4 rooms at City Escape over 2 locations! The interesting thing about City Escape is that they have an overarching plot for all of their rooms involving a character named Neil Parker, who factors into every room in some way. Sometimes this connection was clear, other times it wasn’t as much, but it’s interesting to see an escape room try this.

La Base Secrets: Codigo Rojo (Code Red)

Our first game of the day centered around getting a nuclear weapon from falling into the wrong hands and save humanity. Again. Our host, Biel, was very relaxed and in character as a fellow soldier.

I feel like Codigo Rojo was a good one to start with. Some classic flavour puzzle with a couple of fun “wow” moments. It was also covered in dirt like other escape rooms, but we weren’t required to throw ourselves in it, so we came out much cleaner than the prior day.

This was the first room where our hint system consisted of the host coming in over a walkie and asking us how we were doing, almost like a check in. With the European escapes I am used to being nudged when it’s determined we are struggling with a puzzle. Later this did occur, but I did find it an interesting way to “check in” with us, and I hadn’t seen that before. This might have been a host thing as opposed to the escape room policy because it wasn’t used the other City Escape rooms.

The last room was more dim, and had a searching puzzle we kind of struggled with, but the rest of the room was blessedly bright, which was welcome for our mostly aging eyes (as the young person, Myra has become our resident “reader” now).

Code Red was a good, solid room, and with the visit for the one wow moment and neat mechanics it has.

Academia De Cocina (Cooking Academy)

In Cooking Academy, we played as contestants on a cooking reality show. Reality cooking shows are my guilty pleasure, and I have to say they absolutely nailed the vibe. The second we walked in, our host, Ainhoa, was rocking the Angry Stern Chef energy, standing stock still while we filed in and proceeded to bumble our way through the intro.

I really enjoyed the setup for this one. We were a team on a reality cooking show that had massively screwed up the prior episode. We had a chance to redeem ourselves, by competing against each other to make a 3 course meal to allow us to stay in the competition.

This was, admittedly, one of my most hated style of rooms: the competitive room. This is completely a personal preference, I just panic, worry about disappointing my team, and don’t usually have fun. Luckily, this one ended up being fun. It was myself, Philip, and Margaux against Errol, Lizette, and Myra. But it may as well have been the 3 of us against Myra, because Errol spent most of the time trolling his sister and trying to break Ainhoa, who was a pro at staying the ni nonsense chef.

The puzzles/challenges centered around determine ingredients for our meals. This was pretty well done and also allowed for us to split up our tasks effectively. A couple of the puzzles were definitely more ambiguous than others, though knowing how the game ends I wonder if this was by design and to allow for the teams to potentially have their ingredients differ.

The narrative and theme followed through all the way to the end, when we had to plate and “pitch” our dishes to the host, who scrutinized and criticized them. This was a fun and cute way to end the game.

Also this was apparently Ainhoa’s first game hosting in English! She did great!

TV Studio

This was…an interesting game. I will say it’s my least favourite of the trip so far, and not just because it’s competitive. In this game we played as some random strangers who ended up on a tv game show. I won’t go much into the plot further than that. One thing to note is this game is maximum 4 players for reasons they will become clear if you do it.

Ainhoa was our host again and honestly, she was hands down the best part of the experience. Her performance as a hyperactive production assistant was sheer delight.

The first half had a great build up. The process of getting ready for the show was cute and built up my excitement for the actual game show portion.

But once we actually got there? It started to go down hill for me. As stressed as I was to do a game show, I ended up wishing there was more of it. We ended up in what was essentially a giant communication puzzle, where we were both helping each other out and competing for points.

Unfortunately, our game ended up failing tech wise on a few fronts. The host did her best to fix these as they came up, though. There was one puzzle as well that had a somewhat “destroyable” mechanic where all of us managed to fail to succeed at and had to brute our way through.

The “Neil Parker” element came more into play here, and while it wasn’t entirely clear why he got involved, I think it was mostly due to some language barriers and I was still able to put together context clues to figure it out.

Apart from our host’s stellar performance and a solid opening, this was the first room I felt like we could have skipped. I think I lost a quarter of my voice trying to yell to my teammates.

We struggled with the puzzles a little bit in this room, but I think it was mostly due to it being our last room of the day and the fact that we will always fail searching. Definitely communication puzzles again, but they didn’t get frustrating. This room.was also one we felt busier in, with players having multiple  puzzles to work in at any given time. There was only one where we bottlenecked.

Taverna

All through our trip, our hosts asked us “have you played Taverna yet?!” Followed by an excited gasp of anticipation when they learned we weren’t playing it yet. I didn’t want it to be overhyped so I took the comments with a grain of salt.

And once I played?….yeah. Yeah, I can see why it was hyped. I dare not spoil much, but the basic premise is that you go to a tavern to drink. That is all I knew, and that is what I recommend you go in knowing.

Taverna’s set is amongst the top tier of the industry and, in a few instances, beyond. I have seen a couple of escape rooms do the same theme with equally impressive sets, but where Taverna exceeds them, in my opinion, is in their reveals and pacing. How we transitioned between environments absolutely affected the final reveal.

Our hosts, Uri and Charles, played their parts very well, even with Errol’s efforts to talk their ears off. When Errol can be physically in the same space as an actor, they are essentially doomed). However, Charles achieved the monumental feat of making Errol do a task so that he would be forced to not talk anymore. Seriously, Charles, kudos, that is nigh impossible.

The puzzles had some fun mechanics to them as well. They also focused heavily on communication puzzles, which worked fine until the dreaded large, echoey space issue. It’s not that I hate these styles of puzzles but rather the spaces they end up being utilized in. Escape rooms everywhere: I know sound proofing is challenging in those large spaces but I am begging you, can we please avoid the shouty communication puzzles where no one understands each other? It doesn’t increase challenge, it only increases frustration. If there is a ton of echo in your room, just don’t do it.

There was a colour based puzzle that we struggled to do in the dimmer light. In fact, that also seems to be a theme in a few of the rooms that we did. I am not sure why colour puzzles in darkness is still a thing.

The same goes for dialogue heavy cinematics in large spaces. We lost a lot of the details of the plot simply because we couldn’t hear the words which couldn’t compete with the loud music bouncing all over the space. Don’t get me wrong, the emotion of the big moment still got through, and we were cheering, but any further details were barely caught.

That is my personal qualm with this practice in general, though. Taverna is a wonder to behold. As a large scale escape room, it is at the top of it’s kind. Weirdly though, one of the greatest moments of joy came in one of the smaller reveals, something that had been set up and paid off almost without us realizing it. It was this little moment of small magic that had me yelping with surprise and delight. It was great to see this attention to detail, another reason to get to Taverna when you can.

Vortex Escape: Apophis

Our last escape of the evening was appropriate, as the plot revolves around breaking into a scientist’s office at night. In Apophis, we needed to work to help save the Earth from an incoming asteroid, for which the only possible hope lies in a crazed scientist’s lab.

The set for the most part was standard office/lab, but there were a couple of set pieces that were creative uses of the space that I wasn’t expecting.

My favourite part of the game though was a very but unique small moment that I had yet to see in an escape room. It involved us more in the plot in a way that I wish more escape rooms would try. This and one of the set changes revved up my energy gain.

Manel, our host, was friendly and enthusiastic. He didn’t show up during our game apart from giving us the occasional nudge over the speaker system. He actually told us about a new game opening up that sounds super exciting!

Overall, Day 3 was so much fun with so much quality but also….extremely exhausting. We were all at the end of our limit and when the taxi driver realized construction was blocking his way and we would have to walk the rest of the way home up some very steep hills….I might have broken…a lot.

I learned a lot about my limits and the importance of hydration and rest. But I was still looking forward at all the escape rooms to come!