Fun 4 Brain: Funeral Home (Poznan)

Thank goodness Liz was on form!

Do everything you can to avoid spending the night with corpses!

On our Polish trip we had successfully played some games in Bydgoszcz and had also successfully worked out Polish trains and made our way to Poznan. We had a number of great games lined up, but as we had some free time we decided to add a couple of extra bonus games to help us avoid the rain. The first such game was Funeral Home at Fun 4 Brain.

Fun 4 Brain are located on the north side of town in a very large building that is inhabited by a number of other escape room companies – collectively known as Escapelandia. You can probably get here using public transport but we found Uber to be really reasonably priced, so just did that.

When we arrived, we were early so we had a stroll around the area before heading back to the venue. We were still a bit too early, but fortunately our GM saw us lurking outside and invited us in.

Escaplandia is an interesting place and I’d have loved to have more time to investigate it more – fortunately we were heading back there in a couple of days to play The Green Mile, and Dwarves. Funeral Home was on the ground floor, but there were a few steps to climb to get in the building.

We didn’t get the name of our host, but she was very welcoming and we very much appreciated being able to get in to our game (and the building) early. We spent a few minutes waiting in their comfortable waiting area, before she returned having prepared our game. We received the health and safety briefing in the waiting area and then were escorted down the winding corridors to the entrance to the game.

We were instructed to line up with hands on the person in front’s shoulders and then close our eyes as we were led into the funeral home. Standing with our eyes closed we listened to our mission briefing being played over the speaker, and when the bell rang our mission began.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

The only funeral homes I’ve been in are escape room ones (fortunately), so I can’t comment on its authenticity. But it has all the things I’d expect to see in one; caskets, urns, crosses, Jesus things, and flowers – so I guess that’s authentic?

With funeral home-esque music/noises, it wasn’t an exciting place to be but fortunately was also not deathly silent. Nor was it ever too dark, lighting was actually surprisingly decent at all times.

A little bit of wear and tear here and there gave away a few of the surprises before we found them, but nothing that ruined the game for us. We played as a team of two and had plenty of space to move around, but even bigger teams should be ok.

This game does have some crawling and a little climbing required so if that’s an issue it could be worth speaking to the venue, as they may be able to provide a work around so that only one team player needs to crawl.

PUZZLES

Funeral Home was very much a non-linear game, but there were a few choke points. We found ourselves coming together on a few puzzles but that was mostly because we had missed something that would have enabled us to stay split up.

Puzzles resulted in combinations for padlocks but there was also a lot of tech, and some cool theatrics that didn’t do much in terms of progressing the game, but did add some extra fun.

There were at least two puzzles I can think of where Liz fully turned into Rain Man and just went into a puzzle hole. It was glorious to behold and I just stood back looking utterly confused. She explained it to me later and I definitely understood maybe 62% of what she was saying.

Trying to explain the puzzle types that were present: basic maths, observation, searching, logic, pattern recognition, minor colours, teamwork, audio and communication. The signposting for the puzzles was pretty spot on too, and anything that needed to be in English was translated well.

One puzzle was initially very simple to solve and doing it we did it technically bypassed a puzzle, or it could have. But they designed it in quite a clover way, so however you solved it, you still got payoff for doing so.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Our host was lovely and certainly very attentive to our game. At one point we got as far as we could on a puzzle and just didn’t know where to go next. As soon as we rang the bell to request help, the clue was on the screen. It was enough to get us back on track and realise how stupid we had been that we had missed something obvious.

Despite being a slightly darker theme, this is not a horror game, so if you’re not a fan of being scared, don’t let that put you off. A jump scare here or there? Sure. But not much more than that.

ANYTHING ELSE

There was nothing stand out about this game, it was just fun and fair. We enjoyed the game, and the variety of puzzles, and the only issues we had were our own fault.

Clearly not the best game at this venue, but a nice bonus game to add if you’ve got spare time.

Success/Failed

Final Rating:

Team: 2 Players

Address: Lechicka 59, 61-695 Poznań, Poland

Website: https://fun4brain.pl/