Funroom: Dwarves (Poznań)

Cute, and a very strong start

Sneaky dwarves have robbed the rulers of fairytale lands! Magical goblets are the most important missing items.

At King Dragan’s request, you embark on a mission to find stolen treasures. Details of the mission will be revealed upon arrival.

I’ve kinda lost track of how many games we played on our Polish adventure. We had booked a number of games when we were planning the trip, but we added so many spur of the moment bookings that it’s all become a blur. Dwarves was one of the games we had originally planned to play so it was to be our final game in Poznan before heading back to the station to go to Wroclaw.

Funroom is located at a really interesting venue called ‘Escapelandia’. From what I understand, a number of escape room companies got together, bought a building, and called it Escapelandia – how cool is that?! It’s on the northern side of town, with not a lot in the local area, but it is only a five minute walk from a McDonald’s if you need a quick bite to eat, or something – I steal their wifi!

Funroom is located on the second floor of the building, but I couldn’t see a lift anywhere. We got to the floor, at our allotted time and used Google translate to translate the passive agressive instructions, and then we rang the bell.

After a few minutes our host arrived. We never got his name, but he was friendly and spoke good English (fortunately for us). Funroom were in the process of building a new game (Hansel and Gretel themed) so we walked down the long corridor, strewn about with construction gear, before getting to our surprisingly classy and sedate waiting area.

We locked away our personal possessions before taking a seat on the couch and then waiting for our host to return. When he did, we got the health and safety briefing and a little mission briefing – although I’m not convinced I really understood the story.

Following our host back down the corridor, we found ourselves outside the entrance to the room and before we knew it, we were on a stage coach and heading towards the fairytale lands!

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

I don’t know what I was expecting from this game, well I do, and I don’t think I got what I was hoping for. I think I wanted to end up in The Shire, while it felt more Seven Dwarves, although at times it was like a bit of a cross-over.

The game started strong with some great design choices, but I felt like as the game progressed, the design got a bit less exciting and less magical. Don’t get me wrong, it has the usual things you’d expect from a house made for dwarves, including doorways with much lower access than one would like – read: be prepared to crawl, climb stairs, and shimmy.

The game was very ‘cutesy’ though, and with plenty of ambient noises and music (some straight out of the shire), it was never too quiet in the game – but also never too loud.

Dwarves are obviously fans of good lighting as we never had any issue with seeing what we needed, and when things were triggered, we knew exactly where to go next.

PUZZLES

Despite being dwarves, this game was not short on puzzles; observation, logic, audio, colours, pattern recognition, smell, and very basic maths all made an appearance.

For the most part, the puzzles felt fair but there could have been better signposting for some. I’d also question why we were doing certain tasks and how it made sense in terms of the story, but really, does it matter? It’s an escape room – give me puzzles.

Solving the puzzles generally caused some tech to be triggered and I’m struggling to remember if there were any padlocks in the game. I think perhaps one or two keyed locks but certainly no ‘traditional’ numerical padlocks.

At times the game was non-linear, but the space we were in wasn’t huge, so we seemed to work on puzzles together for most of the game.

I think it was part of the puzzles, so I’m going to mention it here, but the only ‘issue’ we had was when the dwarves were talking to us. Clearly English wasn’t their first language, and being in a high-pitched ‘dwarven’ voice, it made it very hard at times to understand what was being said.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Our actual host was friendly and greeted us warmly, so no issues there. But the actual clue system would have come by requesting help from the carriage driver – we simply had to knock, and help would come. We didn’t require any help, so I can’t comment on how quickly help would have come.

ANYTHING ELSE

This is a cute game and has a fun sense of adventure, especially the beginning. I can’t pinpoint what, but I feel like I just wanted more from this game, perhaps just more excitement somehow?

If you’re looking for a game that is fun and will have you crawling through lots of little doorways, then this is the adventure for you.

Success/Failed

Final Rating:

Team: 2 Players

Address: Lechicka 59/215, 61-695 Poznań, Poland

Website: https://funroom.pl/