Blacksad Private Detective

This is a review of the Escape Room “Blacksad Private Detective” offered by Escape Prod in Bruxelles, Belgium.
  • ⭐️ 7/10
  • 🌡 Difficult
  • ⏳ 60 Minutes
  • 👥 2 – 6 Person

The provider Escape Prod is only a stone’s throw away from Manneken Pis, one of the landmarks of the Belgian capital Brussels. There are four sixty-minute missions for 2-6 players to choose from. The price range is between 80 and 120 euros. We have chosen BLACKSAD PRIVATE DETECTIVE, which is the most difficult room according to the provider.

Blacksad is a comic series around the private detective John Blacksad. A modern fable in the style of Film Noir, in which all characters have human-like bodies, but also – especially in the face – clear characteristics of animals. John Blacksad, the private detective, is a black cat with a white snout. The setting is a big city, which has great similarities to the New York of the 50s. Trench coat and Humphrey Bogart feeling.

Our task is to sneak into the secret lair of a criminal mastermind to find documents that could put Blacksad in danger. What is immediately apparent is that there are no locks in this scenario. All events are triggered by mechanisms and props. The furnishings mostly fit a story set in the 50s. The puzzles were varied and partly not linear. I liked an acoustic puzzle.

There was a reset error! A door that should have been locked was not, and so we could get into a wide room prematurely. Luckily, the light was off there, so we weren’t spoiled too much. The gamemaster came in after a few minutes, after we searched for the light switch without success, and brought us back into the previous room. The second time we entered the room the light was already on.

What I didn’t like was the last part of the game, where there is a fixed countdown that counts down mercilessly, no matter how many minutes a team has left on the clock when they get to this point. That’s what makes this mission difficult in the end. I think our end time would have been 48 minutes otherwise. So, it was a real buzzer beater, as it is called in basketball, where we reached the end of the game with the final chime.

Heiner Stepen

Heiner Stepen