Taiwan & Japan trip round-up

It's been a while! We've been back from our Asia trip for almost a week now but I've been flat out with work and kids heading back to school.

We managed to play a total of 10 escape rooms throughout our trip (8 in Taiwan and 2 in Japan). The reviews will come (hopefully soon), but in the meantime, here's a quick recap and my initial thoughts.

• In Taiwan, we played 8 rooms across 5 different establishments. We stuck to the "English-friendly" rooms for all but one. Unfortunately, only one establishment out of the ones we played at was truly 100% English-friendly.

• Most of the GMs in Taiwan did not speak English (or spoke very limited English) — which was not in itself a dealbreaker if the rules and clues could be delivered in non-verbal ways — but the main problem was that there were some puzzles for which knowledge of Chinese was almost essential.

• The quality of the rooms we played in Taiwan was generally fine for the most part, exceeding my low expectations but failing to truly impress compared to the rooms we have played to date in Australia and Japan. The rooms were well-designed and many featured clever concepts/ideas and strong tech. However, the owners tended to be cost conscious, which could lead to a variety of issues such as lower quality props, poor maintenance, shorter-than-ideal playing times, smaller room sizes, etc.

• Some of the English translations were downright terrible — which especially irked someone like me who works in the language and localisation field — and would have been frankly better off being translated by Google or ChatGPT. My assumption is that owners feel they can skimp on translation costs because the ratio of English-only players is likely extremely low in Taiwan.

• Next time we go back to Taiwan we will simply prioritise the best rooms rather than the most English-friendly ones. There are some very highly rated rooms in Taiwan, though I believe most are in the horror genre. The low labour costs mean they can afford a lot of live actors.

• The highlight of our entire trip was of course the newly reopened Shadow Zen at Studio Escape in Osaka. It was shut down when we visited in December due to flooding from a burst pipe upstairs (apparently the second time!), so we pretty much tailored our entire schedule to sneak in a couple of days in Osaka this time — and it was 100% worth it! Can't wait to share the review!

• Our last room of the trip was at SCRAP's new English-friendly flagship store in Tokyo's Shibuya district. We played The Secret Agent Remake, which wasn't a great escape room but was a really fun spy game.

Stay tuned. I better get a move on because we've got 3 rooms at Cubic Escape in Sydney coming up this weekend (trying to take advantage of their discount special)!