Dark Escape (Yokohama, Japan)
Time limit: 60 minutes
Age limit: None
Player limit: 2-6
Difficulty: 4/5
Date visited: January 2025
Our final escape room on our Japan trip took us to Yokohama, where we visited Dark Escape, a new outfit established by a popular Chinese team from Guangzhou. As I understand it, they develop and release their games in China before adapting them for the Japanese market. As such, their games can be played in Japanese, Chinese or English.
When we visited, they had three rooms, two of which were horror-themed. We went with their most popular room for locals, Fantasy Adventure of Starry Sky Ruins, a fantasy game that felt like it was adapted from a manga, anime, or classic RPG video game.
The first thing we noticed about the room was how beautiful it looked. The “ruins” setting was designed really well, with a degree of realism but a stronger focus on an anime or video game aesthetic. There was actually an NPC in the room with us, an animated cardboard cutout, something we had never seen before and was definitely an interesting stylistic choice. This character played a key role in the story and was also essentially the narrator. All of the audio was in Japanese, but each section of the room had a scrolling display that provided subtitles in English (or, I assume, in Chinese). While this made the game playable by English and Chinese speakers, I did find that it broke the immersion, although I suppose it remained in line with the anime/video game aesthetic. Personally, I would have preferred translated dialogue.
Likewise, the printed material in the game, which was actually very important to solving the puzzles, was provided in all three languages, printed one above the other on the same pages or objects. Once again, this was a compromise that players just have to live with. Having three versions of the same books/objects and needing to change them based on the group coming in next would be too much of a hassle for gamemasters.
The other notable thing about the room was the technology, which we found super cool and arguably some of the most impressive we’ve come across thus far. In addition to automated moving doors and panels, many of the puzzles relied on technology, and there were no padlocks in sight. Moreover, lighting played a big part, with moving spotlights of different colours used to illuminate specific areas or objects that players should pay attention to. Given that the room was quite dark, we found this to be rather useful and improved the flow of the game.
As for the puzzles, quite a few of them required piecing together the hidden history behind the story in the correct sequence — something that turned out to be harder than it sounds. This can be fun especially if you are captivated by the surprisingly complex story, but our team was more concerned about solving the puzzles, and having two impatient kids fighting over the correct sequence was frustrating at times. There was also a hunt and seek element and some fascinating logic puzzles that were challenging but not overly difficult.
Despite the hi-tech nature of the room, the hint system was still an old school walkie talkie, which surprised me a little. Our gamemaster was very modest about his English, which was more than good enough and much better than our Japanese. We only needed one hint because there were a couple of panels that were only in Japanese and we didn’t know what we had to do. Apart from that, our only communications were when he told us at various intervals how much time we had remaining, as there was no clock in the room.
On the whole, Fantasy Adventure of Starry Sky Ruins was a solid experience that was very different to other rooms we had done before. The aesthetics and tech were impressive, but the tri-lingual design did impact immersion and the puzzles could have been stronger and more varied. Given the elements of the room and its strengths and weaknesses, it is perhaps not surprising that the kids rated this room a lot higher than the adults.
PS: Dark Escape is planning on opening a bigger venue with more elaborate games in Tokyo’s Ginza district in 2025. We will definitely look out for it the next time we head back to Japan.
Escape time: 50 minutes out of 60
Verdict: A visually arresting, hi-tech room driven by an anime/video game narrative and aesthetic.
Rating: 8.35
Player | Theming | Atmosphere | Puzzles | Creativity | Fun | Average |
H | 9 | 8 | 7.5 | 8 | 7.5 | 8 |
E | 7 | 7 | 7.5 | 8 | 7 | 7.3 |
Z | 9.5 | 9 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 8.9 |
J | 10 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9.2 |
Rating | 8.35 |
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