Hi everyone
The tenth room on our May/June 2024 child-free trip to Holland was Molly’s Game
at Down the Hatch, located in Voorburg, about a 15 minute uber ride from the
centre of The Hague.
Molly’s Game was the number 1 room in the world (on the TERPECA list) at the time that we played it. I was so incredibly excited to play this room. In fact, I planned the whole trip around this room and I managed to tee it up so that it was my 300th room.
As like many of the best rooms in the world, Molly’s Game
has been constructed entirely within a large warehouse in a very unassuming
industrial area. There is a gym in front of Down the Hatch and when we arrived,
there were sweaty people both inside and out the front of the gym. We saw the
Molly’s Game sign on a side gate and headed around the back.
The reception area is really beautifully-made and I was VERY
excited when I recognised the backdrop I had seen in so many team photos online
of players who had been lucky enough to play Molly’s Game.
Molly’s Game was phenomenal – more specifically, here is
what I thought:
- Molly’s
Game is incredibly special. I would not describe it as an overly scary
room, but rather a narrative-driven experience that has a pretty dark
story at its core. There are certainly eerie moments, but this is achieved
not by live character interactions or jump scares, but by really
well-designed audio and visual effects;
- the
theming in Molly’s Game is off the charts. I lost count of how many spaces
we walked through during our experience, but the scale of Molly’s Game is
enormous. The way in which the various puzzles were woven seamlessly into
the storyline was incredibly impressive;
- the
room flow is also excellent – things start off relatively slowly, with
tension building (and building) throughout until the finale. Molly’s story
is at the heart of the experience. It is really multi-faceted story, with
more details being revealed slowly during the duration of the experience.
Lovers of narrative-driven rooms with intricately-told stories will love
Molly’s Game;
- one
of the most impressive elements of the best rooms in the world, I have
come to learn, are the ‘wow’ moments. These come in all shapes and sizes –
sometimes it is memorable character interactions, other times it is a
moving wall (or ceiling, or floor!), or something simple like an
unassuming door that opens up to a full-scale pirate ship sitting at a
dock in water. I think of the latter ‘wow’ moments as ‘sleight of hand’ or
misdirections. I can recall 2 specific moments in Molly’s Game where the
misdirections genuinely amazed me; and
- I
think what puts Molly’s Game ahead of so many other rooms is that not only
does it have an enormous set full of high tech ‘wow moments’, but the
puzzles are all excellent too. There is the typical hunt and seek fun, but
then as players venture deeper into the experience, the difficulty and
level of immersion/theming with the puzzles grows. We used so many of our
senses, in interesting ways, in playing Molly’s Game and solving her
mystery.
Molly’s Game was a fantastic room and at the time that I
played it, it was hands down my favourite room I had played anywhere in the
world. The reasons for this were many: the really strong storyline that is
woven throughout the experience, the quality and uniqueness of the puzzles that
are again seamlessly woven into the experience, the clever use of
lighting/sounds to create an experience that is full of tension, which builds
steadily throughout, the incredibly quality of the theming in all respects and
the ‘wow’ factor moments. This experience ticks all of the boxes, not to
mention the pure scale of the experience, which is enormous.
Molly’s Game debuted on the TERPECA list at #3. The
following year it was #2, and then #1 in 2023. In 2024, Molly’s Game was #4.
There aren’t too many escape rooms that can say that they have sat in the top 5
rooms for 4 years in a row.
Where:
Populierendreef 966, 2272 HW Voorburg
Duration: 90 minutes
Themes:
1 theme (1 more opening 2025)
TERPECA: #4 in
2024 (formerly #1)
Price:
200€ per
team of 4
Overall Rating: A near perfect room – top 5 TERPECA room
4 years running!
More details: https://www.down-the-hatch.nl/
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