You will be locked in the cells of Jonas "Einstein" Schneider and Giuseppe Rossi. The former inmates previously managed to mysteriously escape. Years later, both the police and the prison guards are puzzled as to how the two managed to escape.

Your job is to find out how the two managed to escape.

The Escape GmbH

Prison

Escape room

I tried really hard to find good things about this room, but there is no way around it: it is plain bad and sloppy.

As the room started, I was very excited about the premise of me and my partner being locked and handcuffed in 2 different cells and working together from a distance to escape. I remember how much I liked a similar short section in Paris' L'Abattoir. I feel like there's a lot of cool puzzles you can design around it. Unfortunately, this room doesn't do any of that. The "cooperation" at a distance mostly involves passing each other things through the bars back and forth in frustrating attempts to make sense of any of the puzzles.

It is the first room we play at the Escape Zürich out of the more difficult ones, and I really don't like their interpretation of "more difficult": 

1. Horrendously difficult to find critical objects, that you are less likely to find thanks to misleading rules such as "the matresses are just decorative"

2. Red herrings up the wazoo, such as a journal of hints  where half the pages are useless (incidentally the more interesting ones) (there is a cheeky final page that indicates which pages are useful, but that just folds into point 1), and the pages that aren't red herrings are too generic to be of any use ("Leave no stone unturned", "The whole is more than the sum of its parts.") and only make sense in retrospect after you stumble upon the solution (or the GM spoonfeeds it to you). Also, the red herring posters and magazine in TimeSet were bad enough, having a prominent combination lock as a red herring feels just too malicious.

3. Random associations that, as far as I can see, build on top of zero clues, and just require a brute force approach, i.e. associating the black board with the bookholder, or the wall writing with the key chain in the nonsensical final puzzle.

And to make it worse, almost nothing builds on top of anything else. There was such potential with this room to create a sense of impending freedom as each constraint you remove enables you to do more things, but no, you don't actually need to open the handcufffs to solve the room, and you don't actually need to free the person in one of the cells: they are just disconnected puzzle threads. 

The only puzzle that comes close to being interesting is the "battleships" puzzle where the 2 cells have to communicate some information to each other, but it's ruined by the fact that it's not needed until after you exit the cells, and it's so hard to find that you probably won't find it before that. 😡

On the bright side, The GM was sweet and let us stay overtime, but man... with escape rooms lke this, just send me to the execution block early 😵

Prison

The Escape Zürich

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BravePiglet