Gateman

We recently played Gateman, the eighth entry in Umeplay’s TAPE series, and it turned out to be one of the most memorable escape room experiences I’ve had.

Umeplay’s TAPE series is part of the QUEST ART line of immersive escape rooms, combining cinematic storytelling with elaborately designed environments, theater, music, and interactive gameplay. Each Tape generally tells its own standalone story, though a few of them are connected or continue one another.

The chronological order of the Tapes, along with the cities where they can be played, is as follows:

01 Insane (Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Changsha, Chengdu, Jinan)

02 Enola (Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu)

03 Reviver (Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Changsha, Chengdu, Qingdao)

04 Sinner (Beijing)

05 Haven (Shanghai)

06 Visage (Beijing)

07 Abeille (Shanghai, Jinan)

08 Gateman (Shanghai)

09 Reviver II (DLC01, Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou)

10 Insane II (DLC02, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen)

Strictly speaking, Reviver II and Insane II aren’t standalone Tapes but DLCs (downloadable contents) for Reviver and Insane respectively, each set in the same location as the original game. 

Anyone hoping to play all 10 Tapes will need to visit at least two cities, Shanghai and Beijing, since some are exclusive to those locations. We always played in the first city listed. The good news for international players: when booking, Umeplay offers the option to add a translator. 

There’s another connection between two Tapes that isn’t obvious at first glance: the one between Visage and Gateman. Visage is set against the backdrop of World War I and tells a love story that reaches beyond death. Gateman picks up decades later and revisits that story in its own subtle way: a familiar object from Visage resurfaces here, quietly tying the two games together, while a familiar face can randomly cross your path along the way. That’s why it’s worth playing Visage first, since only then will the full references and emotional depth of this connection land in Gateman.

We are spies sent on a secret mission into a relic management center. We’re not the first team here, either: earlier groups have lost contact and vanished without a trace. We can’t even say for certain how many times we’ve entered this place before, since time itself seems to have lost its meaning here.

Our central task is to search for relics. Through these relics, brief fragments of their former owners’ wartime experiences are revealed to us, pulling us deeper into the flow of history.

At the heart of Gateman lies a nightmarish, firey monster whose presence is deeply tied to memory and forgetting. Those it touches lose their memories, and the souls of those who are completely forgotten are said to belong to it entirely. It’s a quiet but ever-present threat running throughout the game.

As always with Umeplay, the atmosphere, lighting, and set design in Gateman are top notch. Deliberate lighting signposts the eye toward what matters most, while countless small details, even at the periphery of your vision, give the whole space an incredibly rich, immersive feel.

Alongside a few spectacular effects, Gateman also delivered the large-scale mechanic we’ve almost come to expect by now from China’s top providers, this time for example in the form of a transport mechanism that carried us impressively between the different environments.

The NPCs guided us through the story so subtly that we never felt like passive players, but became the main characters ourselves, building a genuine bond with them along the way. “For victory, until eternity” was a recurring line throughout our Gateman mission, echoing the core message that runs through both Visage and Gateman: to be forgotten is the true end. The emotional story of Gateman stood out for me as the favorite of the entire Tape series.