Tuesday, 22 April 2025

Dark Park - The End Review (The Netherlands)

Hi everyone

The eleventh room on our May/June 2024 child-free trip to Holland was The End at Dark Park, located in Zoetemeer, about a 15 minute uber ride from the centre of The Hague.

The End was our 301st room. The story behind The End is as follows:

“Your order is ready”, a creaky voice on the other end of the phone tells you right before hanging up. Before you know it, you find yourself trembling in front of an old casket store. The door squeaks as you open it and an enormous coffin stares you right in the face from square in the middle of the shop. What did you get yourself into and where will this adventure lead you?

And here is what I thought:

  • I played this room with my wife as a duo.  The experience begins in a funeral home, standing alongside an empty casket.  The theming in this experience was strong, with all items making sense in the space;
  • the experience starts off quite simple and straight forward, with an eerie undertone. However, things change significantly about one third the way into the experience. I would describe that section as being pretty full on ‘scare wise’, with live actor interactions. I think playing as a team of 4 would have been a lot less scary;
  • we survived that section though and from that point on, the scare level decreased significantly. There were some nice live actor interactions in this experience – in fact, that was probably the most unique element of The End;
  • the puzzles were all well-considered and all made sense. There was a mix of simple low tech puzzles, through to some quite high-tech puzzles towards the end of the experience;
  • the finale of The End is pretty special – it was certainly one of the more memorable finishes to an escape room we had played; and
  • overall, I thought this was a strong room but I did not think that this room deserved #65 on the TERPECA ranking, which was its ranking at the time that we played it. The End debuted at #13 in its first year in 2020 – perhaps back then it deserved that ranking, but since the time that we played it, The End currently sits at #91. I think that’s probably about right, based on various rooms I have played since.

Overall, we enjoyed our experience, although during the scary section I was wondering whether we had bitten off more than we could chew. We did survive it though. Whilst I would probably rank The End in the bottom half of the rooms that we played on this trip, we still enjoyed it and could appreciate those elements that other enthusiasts clearly loved about The End.

Where:                 Dorpsstraat 33A, 2712 AB Zoetermeer

Duration:            60 minutes

Themes:              6 themes

TERPECA:          #91 in 2024 (formerly #13)

Price:                    From 135€ per team of 2

Overall Rating:     Great live actor interactions and a great finale

More details:        https://www.darkpark.com/en/escape-room-zoetermeer-the-end/


No comments:

Post a Comment