The Curse
With The Curse I played the last of the 4 escape rooms this company has to offer and I was never disappointed by them (although Back to the USSR is more a beginner’s first-generation room). The Curse is like all the other 4 escape rooms at this company, what it is usually known as a turn key escape room. While generally the term does not exactly spark enthusiasm among addict players like myself, a turn-key room is not necessarily a bad room.
There are home-made rooms, which in spite of being home-made are considerably lower quality than a nice turn key one. And there are differences, obviously, depending on how the company implements them and also in the costs of the turn key room. Just for illustration a very disappointing turn key room I have played in Vienna, which has closed in the meanwhile, is offered for $17000, while Steampunk Adventure (another room at My Escape Club, which I enjoyed) is sold for $41300.
Anyway, like I was saying The Curse is in my opinion one of this good turn key rooms, that cannot compete with top tier games, but provides for a nice, entertaining experience, even much more if you do not have so many rooms on your back as we do. The Curse is a “modern” room in the sense of practically no locks, with some nice mechanisms and in general a nice flow. It is language independent and provides for a slightly spooky feeling for the escaper doing his/ger first steps. As a matter of fact, an owner of the previous game we played mentioned that. It was funny though how his description was, compared to how we lived it, as horror tempered escapers. While this kind of rooms are generally linear, The Curse had at least a substantial part, in which, being two, we were busy doing different things.
About The Curse (and this applies to the other rooms at the venue) it has to be said that it is a room to be played with two, maximum three players. Anything more than that will result in a less satisfying experience. And one thing I really appreciate about My Escape Club is the honesty, with which they approach this, as they explicitly recommend in their website for experienced teams to be 2 or 3. I would like to see this more and not like I remember from a famous top tier German room, which advertises its room for 4-8 (8 only possible if you play on top of each other in some spaces) and recommends 5-6, when 3 or 4 is more than enough.
In relationship to this, I usually recommend the rooms in My Escape Club for visitors and locals alike, as they offer a two person’s price, which is not that common in the Netherlands and therefore results in a good price/value relationship. While everyone should play something like Amsterdam Catacombs, the barrier to pay 60-70 Euros per person as a couple is not minor. The location of this company close to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum and the relative long opening times, makes it ideal for casual and not so casual players visiting the area.
The only warning is that being a turn-key room, you might have played this room, somewhere else. Concretely, as the owner pointed out, The Curse is playable in The Great Escape Frankfurt under a different name, namely “Das verfluchte Kloster”, where unluckily it only lasts 60 instead of 75 minutes, it is considerably more expensive as a couple and they accept up to 8 players (see comment at the beginning: “how the company implements them”).
