The Haunting of Noriko

Escape Games Canada (North York, Toronto, Canada)

Time limit: 60 minutes

Age limit: Under 12 requires adult

Player limit: 3-8

Difficulty: 4/5

Awards: TERPECA Nominee (2019-2020, 2025), Best of Morty (2025)

Date visited: July 2026

On this day, we went to Vaughan Mills for some shopping and lunch, and while E continued her shopping adventures, I took the boys south to North York, where we played two games at Escape Games Canada, starting with The Haunting of Noriko. They were kind enough to accommodate us with custom time slots booked months in advance.

I had heard mixed things about this game and wanted to check it out for myself. It's a rather old game and was nominated for TERPECA in 2019 and 2020, but did not see TERPECA success again until last year, making it an unusual 4-year hiatus between nominations. So how was it?

• Noriko was a creepy, solid take on the Japanese horror genre. If you've seen movies like Ring and The Grudge, you'll have an idea of the type of atmosphere they're going for.

• The theming was good but a little uneven, perhaps reflecting the fact that it's an older build. They had decor that captured the essence of a traditional Japanese house well, but also props and puzzle mechanisms that felt oddly out of place, poking holes in the overall immersion.

• One of the most unusual aspects of the room was its two-level design, meaning we had to go up and down the stairs numerous times throughout the game. To me, apart from the accessibility issue, it was both good and bad — in that it created some sense of movement and truly separated us when solving teamwork puzzles, but it also ate up a lot of time and energy because one of the rules was to never run on the stairs for safety reasons.

• For a horror room without a live actor, Noriko was surprisingly effective in crafting scares through not just sound, lighting, and darkness, but also haunting imagery. It utilised some clever props and tricks for jump scares, and I can definitely see these tactics catching players off guard and freaking them out.

• The puzzles were more of a mixed bag. Some were excellent, while others were either a little basic or unnecessarily difficult (I'm talking specifically about a dexterity puzzle that was not aligned with the theme yet ate up the biggest chunk of our time and was more frustrating than fun).

• The flow was also a little wonky as puzzles were scattered all around and we struggled at times figuring out what to do next, even though we eventually managed to get by without asking for any clues.

• I assumed they had made a lot of changes to the game over the years and especially more recently, explaining why it got another TERPECA nomination last year. But I checked with someone who played this game 12 years ago and some of the puzzles and things he didn't like about it are still there! That said, for a game THAT old, it still holds up incredibly well, and would have been mind-blowing for some players when it was first released.

Escape time: 38 minutes and 3 seconds

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

Verdict: An older but still relatively scary non-live actor horror room that makes the most of its eerie theme through creepy atmosphere and creative scare tactics.

OVERALL RANK:

H	Z	J
B+	B+	B+