This is part of a series of articles on games in Amsterdam – click here for the introduction and links to all the other articles.

Well off the beaten track, you wouldn’t be surprised to find that Logiclocks has been around for a long time. It’s the original escape room in Amsterdam and, as luck would have it, a very good one. I suspect that part of the reason that Amsterdam games are so good is that this and Sherlocked were the first two on the market. A lot of people open up their escape rooms because they play one and think “I could do that”. That’s far less likely here than in most markets.

There’s a small waiting area with puzzles out at the front of the venue where you can wait while previous teams finish up, and then they take you down to a larger space for your intro. It’s a bizarrely big space that would likely have been converted into an escape room in London but here is just used for the introduction… wow. Perhaps partly because they’ve dedicated such an impressive space to it, the GM introduction was top notch, with him slipping in and out of the story at will, giving you little tidbits about the main character and leaving you to fill in the blanks yourselves. There’s a a short video to give you a bit more background, which worked well to set the scene. With most games, the central character isn’t really very important, but here they take the time to really show off who she was, and rightfully so – story is important here, and Eliza Lionheart is critical to getting that story across.

Eliza’s Heart (4.5 stars)

The theme and set worked really well in this game. At its heart, you’re in an explorer’s home, but they’ve gone to a lot more trouble than throwing a few antiques into a room and hoping for the best. I got the feeling that each piece had been carefully chosen to fit within the space and that they’d really tried to imagine what a room belonging to Eliza would have looked like.

The puzzles weren’t as numerous as you might want from the perfect room, but they were enough to keep us occupied and they were chunky – almost all of the puzzles I encountered had a physical interaction with the room. Not skill-based, just making good use of interesting props. The style of puzzle was varied enough to keep us interested, and the difficulty level was good too.

As the game progressed, the story unfolded in an impressive narrative that really showed the psyche of the main character and made me genuinely feel attached to her in the story. Alongside that, the puzzles and set also developed so that by the end it felt like we’d lived the story.

We escaped in about 35 minutes having taken no clues. I’d recommend taking along a minimum of three people, but up to five would probably turn out OK, and it’s a game that I enjoyed experiencing together.

That’s all about Logiclocks – want to read more about Dutch games? Click here to head back to the main Amsterdam page.