ElamysTeeri - Room Escape, Tampere

We played "Marie's Portraits" with my husband without previous escape room experience, and I have a feeling that it's going to take a very long time to find a room that would surpass any aspect of this one. The room is absolutely beautiful, full of detail and every object can be tampered with. You can pretty quickly recognize which items are significant and which are just decorations (no extra keys without matching locks or anything alike). Everything that's written is both in English and Finnish, and the story is linear and makes sense. What I find really impressive, is the fact that the room is built entirely by a single couple. Now, this doesn't mean that it would lack professionalism, labor input or proper engineering, and you can tell it's been created with passion, ambition and great artistic skill. The game master was extremely pleasant, communicative and spoke flawless English. He had time for a chat afterwards, and was very eager to answer questions, point out things we had missed in the room and offer feedback about our performance. You could immediately tell that he's actually enjoying this, and not just working there. As it was our first room ever, he was even kind enough to grant us some extra minutes if we couldn't make it out within the hour. With a few hints we however escaped just one minute later than intended. The hints were perfectly challenging too - straight answers were never given, you'd still feel like you solved it all by yourself. The way the hints were handed out was very clever, enhancing the atmosphere rather than interrupting it. I'm devastated that I can never again repeat this specific room (at least not with the same sense of wonder or without entirely ruining my partner's gameplay), but! This problem has been addressed before I even knew about it: a very cozy viewing room exists, so you can revisit the experience by watching your friends or family struggle through the same problems later on!

My first time in an escape room, and an excellent experience. The others in our group did have prior experience and they were especially impressed by the variety of the problems. There were not only numerical tricks to open the locks, instead a lot of imagination and skills had to be used by the players to solve the tasks. The props were well planned as well. Highly recommended