I apologise for not writing up on Lockdown KL soon enough. They have really good games, and I particularly enjoyed Top Secret. Lockdown KL is located at one of the top floors in Lot 10, Bukit Bintang. It is situated far away from the usual mass of traffic at the ground floor and basement, so it may be hard to notice. This is a franchise coming in from Singapore. We’ve also played a new room at Lockdown Sg, with reviews coming soon. As Lockdown Sg is a partnership between Singaporean and Hungrarian game designers, you would be able to find rooms which are more Singaporean or Hungrarian in flavour (not the language!). We were informed that Top Secret is a Singapore-design game. It does have some minor modications to localize the puzzles to the KL setting, which is kinda awesome.
Top Secret is not a big room. Yet we’re impressed in the number of puzzles being fit into such a small space, with effective use of space and all the props. In this game, we are to sneak into a competing firm’s office to steal a trade secret. Industrial espionage in action! Despite being really small, the room feels real. It looks exactly like your dad’s old school office with desk and lockers and old laptops. The puzzles are thematic at its best, incorporating some of the commonly found office technologies, which helps in the immersiveness of the game. Even though this is one of the more difficult games in Lockdown KL, the puzzle difficulty would be suited for all levels of players except for probably the true beginners. Most puzzles are low in complexity, involving matching clues or numbers to the corresponding locks. We like that there are no tedious searches, and no distractions. One puzzle requires a little more out of the box thinking (we’re stumped on that for very long), and this is the only puzzle that feels out of place in the whole setting. There wasn’t much physicality involved, so skirts are ok here. The endgame is satisfying, with the success of retrieving the secret document and escaping in time.
In short, we would recommend Top Secret, especially for its thematic puzzles although being a little simple. We bulldozed through 3 games in a day, a testimonial of the enjoyable time we had. We also had a great chat with David, one of the game designers here. We learnt about the use of a psychology concept called Flow theory in designing great escape games. Hopefully, Lockdown KL will continue to import more games from their Singapore HQ. We are running out of games to play~~
Image grabbed from Lockdown KL, go book a game!!
Top Secret
Pros
- Malaysianized puzzle
- Thematic puzzles
- Immersiveness
Cons
- Small room
- 1 arbitary puzzle
- Lack of physicality