Cutthroat Cavern

Cutthroat Cavern is a game whose resume is tough to beat. It made the name for itself by taking the 2nd place in the first edition of TERPECA (2018) and holding strong in the following years, making it one of the iconic staples of the USA escape market. It’s the flagship game of 13th Gate Escape at Baton Rouge, Lousiana, which may not be among the most convenient destinations, but Cutthroat Cavern makes travelling there well worth it.

For the sake of any comparisons, keep in mind that this is quite an old game, but it is still an amazing game even all of these years later. No acting and only 60 minutes may sound quite underwhelming for nowadays standards of top games, but I assure you that 13th Gate Escape made a great use of that time. Prepare to pick up your jaw from the floor at least a few times – the number of amazing reveals this game contains is astounding! In my opinion it had arguably the best set design out of all games we’ve played on this trip (rivalled probably only by The Quest for the Temple of Light). To think that somebody had courage to build all of this so many years ago is especially impressive!

The current trend for new escape rooms seems to be that the focus is more on making the experience flow more smoothly and one way of achieving this is by creating less demanding puzzles and designing gameplay in a more linear manner. That is a direction that may not be to a direct liking of multiple escape room enthusiasts that love solid puzzling. Such enthusiasts may be happy to hear that basically all 13th Gate Escape games are puzzle fests and Cutthroat Cavern is no exception. The puzzles were designed in a non-linear fashion and there were definitely enough of them to keep a group of 5 experienced enthusiasts busy, so personally I felt the thrill of having to bring my puzzle A-game and the gameplay was very engaging to me. I’ll just put a warning that 13th Gate gave off an impression of being strict with the time control, so in basically all their games you’d really want to finish the game in the allotted 60 minutes and for that you might need to not shy away from getting help from the GM along the way (and best, tell them before the game that you’d really want to finish the game and are willing to get the required help).

Summing up, combining jaw-dropping set design and engaging gameplay is a recipe to create a game that I’ll love. I’m very happy that after all these years I finally managed to experience the legend of Cutthroat Cavern and even with that hype it still exceeded my expectations!