Mama Bazooka: The Dome

A three Michelin star restaurant is said to be so good that it's worth planning a special journey to eat there. That's how I feel about The Dome. Even though I know that virtually none of my friends here in the US are going to make the trip to Bunschoten, I can't help but try to convince them because it is totally worth it. It's such a brilliant combination of mechanisms, theming, environment.

incredible experience.  Worth the trip to the Netherlands.

Top room and incredible space. A must do room. Expect to race against the clock as a lot to do in the hour. 

So, The Dome is the one people talk about; unsurprisingly because of its ridiculous budget and therefore production values, scale, variety in themes... 

It is spectacular and if you're touring around for the best games, you definitely need to play it. It's a 5* star game, and yet it's certainly not perfect. In fact, our team didn't really get along with it. It's clever, and certainly well maintained but it feels like there's something not quite right in the design of the game that if it wasn't so impressive in other ways would make me want to remove a star. We didn't leave joyful or satisfied but instead frustrated.

The game definitely seems to take pleasure in messing with you, and for much of the experience, that's fine and fun. Other moments have you questioning whether or not your teammates are messing up, and when it's such a team based room it really put a rift into our team.

It's tough to explain without spoilers, and the less you know about this one, probably the better, but to give a very vague example of what I mean, there's a communication puzzle that requires you give instructions through an intercom of what to do... except they pump up the volume of the music at this stage, so you're shouting over each other to pass on instructions. That would be annoying on its own, but the intercom also has a delay on it, so you're shouting to someone else, who is shouting into the intercom, and the person receiving the instructions seems to be ignoring you. Other moments force you to fail at some reasonably simple tasks which makes you question whether your teammate is a moron or perhaps if the tech was faulty. Neither option is something you want to be feeling when you play an escape room. Of course our host was lovely in explaining all this to us afterwards, with a decent enough reason for it from a game-run standpoint which gave us a bit of relief that we weren't morons, and restored faith in the room, but it was too late at that point. The last couple of puzzles were a bit anticlimactic given the rest of the room, but ultimately you'll appreciate the experience as a whole anyway, so this isn't a big problem.

The debrief is fantastic and unique, but at that point we weren't in a position to enjoy it as much as we should have.

Given the flaws I've mentioned, it doesn't seem like it should be getting a 5* score, but the rest of it is just so outrageously elaborate that i can't bring myself to remove a star. So if you're going to play this one - and you should - go into it knowing that the game is going to mess with you, and have in the back of your mind that The Dome may deliberately try to make you and your teammates fail at certain points.

Deserves all it's praise. Not to miss