Hidden In Hamburg: The Forbidden Game

After escaping from the Master of Time room, our amazing game master Betti offered us to book another room after her working hours. We loved Master of Time so much that we accepted to try their scary room at 11pm in the evening, needless to say it was already late enough to put us in the mood of a scary room.

Before talking about the room, let me tell you something about Betti. She was probably the best game master I've ever had in 80+ rooms, she was honest about the rooms of her company, she wasn't protective about receiving feedback, she was putting some characters and role play to her introductions and she knew what ER enthusiasts are looking into when going for an escape. I can't be more grateful to Betti and Felix to open outside of business hours to allow us to book as many rooms as possible during our limited time in Hamburg. Not playing that impromptu Forbidden Game would have been a massive loss!

The Hidden in Hamburg scary room is giving Jumanji realness. You first enter in a small room where you face a 'Goose game'. The introduction of the room was in German, not sure if it was a mistake or if it's not fully translated but you quickly understand that you are about to play against the ghost/spirit to survive through a creepy and scary game, which will make you jump, scream and maybe even grab the legs of your partners.

The room contains a lot of impressive designs and very clever light shows that highlight the story unrolling in front of your eyes. The puzzles of the room are very clever but the strength of the room lays in the impressive effort put into some events and atmosphere that could easily have been skipped when creating the room but instead it was clear that when creating the room, the designer really wanted to bring the feeling of a scary movie jump and scares. I wish I could describe in details what happened but I would not want to waste the surprises!

Several suggestions came to mind after sleeping on this escape: to make the Goose game a bit clearer, 'Start' could be written on the game board as we didn't understand which end was the start and which was the end. To add the feeling of excitement that you get when playing the Goose game and wondering which square you are going to land on, the game itself could be improved by decorating each square by different 'outcome': a coffin drawing would illustrate the coffins rooms while a creature drawing would point you to the creature room etc.. I can already picture myself going "Oh no, no please don't draw a 5, I don't want to land on the bloody spike room!").

Our team got a bit stuck in the second room, not sure if the puzzle flow wasn't made obvious to us or if we were simply tired after escaping from 2 rooms just before that one. It also felt like 5 persons was maybe a bit too many for that room that allows up to 7 players, I would not recommend it for more than 4 players maybe, just because some rooms are quite small and doesn't allow to have several players working on the same puzzle.

When debriefing our escapade to Hamburg with the rest of the crew, we all seemed to agree that this room was our favourite one of the trip and would be the "best escape room to go to when during a stag-do in Hamburg". We absolutely loved it and are so glad we got to play it with that last minute booking!

High quality set design again from HIH, didn't enjoy this one as much as the Golden Skull/Master of Time games - perhaps more just having an inexperienced GM but found elements of this game very frustrating (one issue relating to a translation used in the game, another with a puzzle which we really struggled to understand and which the clue took us rather outside the immersive experience). There are undoubtedly great aspects to this game, and it still rates as far higher quality than the majority of games with an enjoyable back story and some good puzzles and theatrics - I would still recommend playing it but some of the logic aspects were a little more stretched in this one than the other games.