Awaken

We are a team of experts, appointed by the Vatican, to verify the veracity of the rumors of demonic events, to decide whether the village chapel is declared an unholy place and, as a result, will be closed forever.

Awaken is the name of the first room of the new provider “The Next Door” in Barcelona. Sounds like horror!? It is! Means Dominique (not a fan of creepy games) is out of the game and is kindly allowed to make herself comfortable in the bleachers.

After an immersive intro, we begin our inspection of the sanctuary. At first glance, we do not notice anything unusual …
The atmosphere in the first phase of the game was good. The scenario looks realistic. Impressive decoration! The puzzles here make sense and are well integrated. There are no locks!

The next stage of the game was a bit too lengthy for me. Darkness and relatively complex, reading-intensive puzzles are never a good combination. The game flow is slowed down by the insufficient lighting conditions. I get impatient, especially since I don’t really help much with the texts written in Spanish. Translating in the dark is too difficult. But after this smaller dry spell, the game is finally picking up speed again.

The player feedback when something was successfully solved could be improved in part. Sometimes it is not quite catchy how and where to go. There are some predictable but also unexpected shock moments during the game. The acting interludes were properly timed and well executed. I liked.

The initial level in terms of atmosphere and decoration cannot be maintained over the entire course of the game. There are also weaker passages. The puzzles, fairly linear, could be a little more varied. Nonetheless, we felt well entertained most of the time. We laughed, screamed a lot – at least Enric – and successfully completed our mission after 70 minutes.

Our special unit consisted of three delegates from the Vatican. In my opinion, the team size should not exceed four people.