The Experiment, Thrill Park, Prague

The Experiment isn’t your bog-standard escape room. Well, it is, in that you still locate clues, solve riddles, and decipher padlocks and other pieces of an overarching puzzle. But there’s more to it than that. No, Thrill Park’s The Experiment—a forty minute experience that can be played in groups—is also a live-action horror game, too, and thus, an excuse for its psychiatric wardens to instill fear into their involuntary patients for a short while before chasing them out of the back door with a chainsaw (there’s always a chainsaw). And in case you’ve yet to figure that last part out — that’s you. Boohoo.

The Experiment takes you to a dimly lit scientific laboratory—an operating room, of sorts, where you begin your questionable journey cold, alone, and with multiple chains holding you against the wall. Blindfolded, and stuck to a wheelchair, you soon find yourself with a robed stranger—the doctor’s “failed” experiment who, as a result of the awry nature of the previous surgery, has become violent, unpredictable, and traumatically unstable. But there’s a twist: they’re on your side, and their best intentions are to aid your efforts in thwarting the doctor’s next experiment before the timer hits zero. That doesn’t mean they can’t scare the absolute crap out of you, though. Oh yeah — they do that, and then some.

The puzzles in The Experiment aren’t complex (I’d wager that they are more intermediate, if anything), so if you are somewhat unfamiliar with escape rooms, then you haven’t got much to fret about here. In fact, most of the puzzles are self-explanatory, so it’s more the case of reading the room and critiquing the lines with a fine-tooth comb — and analyzing the props, of course. For us, we were able to sweep the room beneath the rug in just short of 32 minutes out of the possible 40 with one clue from our frightening friend. But there was a reason why we were so apprehensive about vocalizing our confusion: that friend was BLOODY terrifying. From popping up behind the mirror when we least expect it to swiveling in an abandoned wheelchair in tandem with the flickering light switches; freaky wasn’t cutting it. It was haunting.

Kudos to the team at Thrill Park, because honestly, The Experiment is not only aesthetically appealing, but absolutely teeming with great set pieces, gory patchwork, creative puzzles, and immersive recordings. Add the fact that the scare actors aren’t spring chickens to their line of work, and you’ve got all the right ingredients for a fantastic escape room experience in Prague. Granted, it isn’t the longest escape room you’ll ever participate in, but when every second is made to feel like an hour, you won’t be complaining about it “being too short”, either.

SKULL SCORE

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