In the House of Scales [鱗屋之中]

The King Pork [頂級豬排遊戲工作室] (Taipei, Taiwan)

Time limit: 70 minutes

Age limit: 12+ recommended

Player limit: 2-6

Difficulty: Medium

Awards: Golden Escape Award (Taiwan) - Best Narrative Puzzle Game (2022)

Date visited: April 2026

Taiwan has its own Golden Escape Awards, which I used to guide me on which rooms to book on this particular trip. One of the award winners that kept popping up was 鱗屋之中 (roughly translated to In the House of Scales), which won the 2022 award for Best Narrative Puzzle Game. For this game, I went with the boys and my mother, as E had to work (remotely). Did it live up to the hype?

• We started off watching a video about the story of the house, which involved a family that obtained great wealth and fortune due to a magical object many years ago. But they are long gone now, and all that remains is this house with a roof of shiny scales...

• In the House of Scales was a narrative-driven, multi-linear, puzzle-dense room with several sections where players could traverse back and forth. Despite sounding rather chaotic, the flow was surprisingly smooth.

• The theming was solid but not a highlight of the room. It felt like several connected rooms in a simple house, with standard furniture pieces modified to contain puzzles. In addition to number locks, word locks, and mag locks, there was a fair amount of tech in the room, but they were generally smaller moving mechanisms or simple lighting effects. They looked fine but lacked wow factor.

• The strength of the room lay in its puzzles, of which there were a great number and variety. Careful observation, logical deduction, making connections, and following cryptic instructions were all required.

• An ability to read Chinese was essential, as just about every puzzle involved a fair bit of reading. With only my mother and I being reliable Chinese readers, our team was slowed down in certain parts, though the boys made up for it with some quick and clever solves.

• A more unusual aspect of the room was that it required teams to make multiple choices throughout the game (usually between two options). There's no "right" or "wrong" choice, though the decisions you make could ultimately affect your ending (albeit not as drastically as imagined).

• Technically, there was a "live actor" (or NPC, as the Chinese-speaking market likes to call them) in the room, but it was really just our GM, who acts as the "housekeeper" that comes in occasionally to check on us (and offer clues if necessary). She was also the "librarian" who would bring us certain books if we required them to solve puzzles.

• From memory, we didn't really ask for any hints, but our GM may have voluntarily offered a couple. The interesting thing about this room was that teams could actually skip a lot of the puzzles and still complete it, but the achievements they unlock would be significantly reduced. Our team actually could have ended the game only 25 minutes in, but of course we chose to stay and complete every puzzle, finishing with 9 minutes remaining.

• Completing every puzzle allowed us to unlock as many of the achievements as we could (some could not be unlocked due to the choices we made), which really just meant that we could hold up more cardboard signs in the team picture at the end.

Note: I understand there are several version of this game, including a horror version. We played the "complete" version. I was also told that a sequel was potentially in the works.

Escape time: 61 minutes out of 70

Theming	Atmosphere	Puzzles	Creativity	Fun
B+	B	A	A-	B+

Verdict: A more traditional narrative-driven escape room with a few new-generation elements that stands out for its abundance and variety of interesting and challenging puzzles, smooth multi-linear game flow, and decision-making mechanism. Definitely one for puzzle lovers (who can read Chinese).

OVERALL RANK:

H	Z	J
B+	A-	A-