The Pharmacy

The name of this escape room does not say much, but yes, it is another room, where the underlying story is connected to the one and only Sherlock Holmes. This room came highly recommended by many local players, although our friends from El Quinto Elemento were not so enthusiastic about it, and I could also see why after playing this room.To start with, the game had two options, with or without actor. You have to pay a couple of Euros more for the version with the actor, and the idea is adding tension (read it as scare jumps). I honestly thought that the presence of an actor was going to improve our experience, specially to make our horror lover Heiner happy, as Madrid does not have so many horror options. Little did I know back then, that our other team member was not particularly fond of being scared and after bravely (well, more or less) surviving the forest (see review of the Escape Room El Bosque, that we played earlier on that day), this proved to be a little bit too much for his nerves, so during the game I really regretted I chose that option, as all that suffering was really unnecessary.My advice is to go for the option without an actor, even if you are into horror, like Heiner and myself. There was not really much of an addition by the presence of the actor, and at certain moments I even found it annoying. Part of the acting is well-timed and adds to it, if you like that, but at moments it was either unnecessary or repetitive.

Independently of this, our experience was not the best. The room has a very good start, with a nice introduction. The set looks really good, and I can see why this room is so highly evaluated. For some reason, maybe because it was late at night, the game did not flow as it should have. There were a few puzzles, that were quite a stretch. One that in my opinion even required some kind of outside knowledge, and other that was from the manual on how not to make a puzzle fun. At the end the experience depends on many things, we really did not find our way into the game. The distractions by the actor did surely not help in focusing on the puzzles. Also because of the many positive comments about this room, I had rather high expectations and wanted to play it since my last visit to Madrid, but unluckily I ended up rather disappointed.