Lost Way Ticket [失落魔境：序章]

Funlock Studio - Taipei (Taipei, Taiwan)

Time limit: 70 minutes

Age limit: 12+ (probably due to fragile props)

Player limit: 3-6

Difficulty: Medium

Date visited: April 2026

With E working again, I took my mother and the boys to another Funlock room. We previously played Song of Inari and Arabian Nights, their two "English-friendly" rooms, both of which were small but solid (and badly translated). This time, we went straight for their biggest, newest room, Lost Way Ticket, a Harry Potter-style room that looked great on their marketing materials. Note that there was quite a bit of reading involved, so unless they translate everything, this game would not be playable by non-Chinese readers. These are my thoughts on the game:

• Lost Way Ticket was far bigger, prettier, and more advanced than the other two rooms we played at Funlock. In fact, while the room was located in the same building, we had to go down to a different floor in order to play it. The room had multiple spaces of different sizes, some of which were surprisingly spacious.

• I can't really remember the story because it wasn't very memorable, but it basically mirrored Harry Potter in that you receive a letter and a ticket to a train that takes you to a magical world.

• The theming of this room was very impressive. It reminded me a little it of Escape This's The Wizard's Chamber and Scram's The Sorcerer's Secret in Sydney (both Harry Potter rooms), but with even more props and details. It had shades of Diagon Alley at the Harry Potter Studio Tour in Tokyo and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios — but with more lively colours.

• The tech was also very strong, with plenty of lights, sounds, moving parts, and even animatronics, albeit on a smaller scale. They were really cool, but just don't expect anything massive or too elaborate.

• This was a semi-linear room, in that you progress through the game linearly as a team, but each area might have a few multi-linear puzzles that will allow you to divide and conquer. It felt like there were quite a lot of puzzles to do. Most of them were not difficult, but as often is the case with tech-heavy rooms, figuring out the correct way to manipulate the finicky tech took up a lot of time.

• That said, I had issues with some of the puzzles, which I believe could be polarising. Smell, sound, and touch puzzles are not for everyone, and this room had them all. The smell puzzle required you to know what certain things smell like, while the sound puzzle was super fast and difficult to hear/understand. We took ages figuring it out and eventually got there through a lot of guessing and checking (which is never fun).

• If you manage to finish the main puzzles in time, you will be offered 6 bonus puzzles. We only managed to get through half of them before time ran out. One of them required knowledge of Zhuyin, a transliteration system for Standard Chinese used almost exclusively in Taiwan.

Escape time: 70 minutes out of 70

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

Verdict: Funlock's latest addition is a big, ambitious game with a beautiful, theme park-style set and plenty of hi-tech effects, but the style of the puzzles and their finicky nature could be polarising for some players.

OVERALL RANK:

H	Z	J
B+	B+	B