Sherlock’s Despair (Game duration 60 minutes)
Fury team: Venelin Gornishki, Hristo Tomov, Dimitar Smilyanov, Nadezhda Danabasheva
Fury time: 45:00 minutes
Witches Abroad team: Velina Tomova, Jordan Danchev, Vanya Stoitseva, Alla Danabasheva
Witches Abroad time: 50:00 minutes
Date: December 7, 2018
After two mediocre rooms about Sherlock Holmes, I had lost hope that I would ever find a worthy representation of Conan Doyle’s character and, of course, my beloved detective.
Sherlock’s Despair pleasantly surprised me. First, the room stays true to the era, and there is nothing in the room that is not known in the last decades of the 19th century, Victorian Britain. And now, even if I spoil a bit, please forgive me. I never expected to have fun and spend a great time on a premise with only one room, but it turned out to be an absolute fact. Not only there is no other room than what we originally entered, but in no way during our entire game did it prevent me from having a blast, I lacked neither dynamics nor surprise, the room was superb at all.
It is one of the best classic rooms we’ve been to, with no claim to be over the top and a lot of puzzles that made us wonder and scratch our heads. We haven’t met some of them, and their design was not quite like for an average team. And let the word “classic” not fool you, in this room super interesting mechanics have been used and combined. Keyword – combined 🙂
We lost 5 minutes because of a little mathematical mistake. We always overcomplicated things and missed the biggest, in-our-face, visible, and impossible-to-miss clue and solved the final puzzle (again) by not solving the last 2-3 puzzles; so we got our lost 5 minutes back. For me, Sherlock’s Despair deserves a high place in my personal ranking of rooms abroad, and I highly recommend it for teams that are just dipping a toe into escape room games. With the games as in The Code Escape Rooms, one can easily and quickly understand why the genre has so many fans and why it is so addictive.
There is a #noHintZ wall of fame in The Code lobby, with about 30 teams presented on it. Now, there is one more 😎.