Horror Club

Everyone knows Heiner loves horror and since this game opened Heiner has been wanting to go to Madrid again. However, several of the games that opened in Madrid and several of the games that will open in Madrid are games that were bought from Barcelona and whether changed or unchanged are not very attractive for travelling enthusiasts, who have already played them. After a critical mass of new original games opened and combining those with some rooms we could not play in previous trips, I had no excuse anymore and a trip to Madrid was organized to play, among others, this game.
Horror Club is the latest game from Madrid Terror, where we had played Paranormal Experience several years ago. This game is very different from the previous game, which was an interesting psychological horror experience. Horror Club offers three different modes: tension, high tension and extreme. Tension is without physical contact and to be honest I think it would lose a lot of what the game is about. A detailed description is on the website but the other modes include to a more or lesser extent insults, sexual references, humiliation and of course physical contact. I personally do not like extreme experiences. Physical violence and playing in underwear (which for some reason appears to be a constant in extreme experiences in Spain) does not sound very appealing to me, so we chose the “high tension mode”.

For the kind of game I was expecting I was surprised to find riddles, right at the beginning. Of course there is not lot of them, nor are they particularly difficult, but already this aspect was better than what I originally expected. It is difficult to describe this game, which essentially lives from the interactions with the actors. I can imagine the experience varies a lot from group to group. We did not have precisely a group of people being afraid and therefore our session had more humor than horror to be honest. The game had lots of sexual references, such as invitations to stick objects in certain places, to give you an idea of the nature of the game.

I do not think that it is a game that will necessarily appeal the standard escape enthusiast. It is a game to have fun (or fear if you are that kind of person), play your role and “enjoy” (yeah, this sounds weird) the interactions with the actors. It is a game to play in a group of friends, for instance on a bachelor’s party, particularly if you do not have problems with insults and the sexual content. It is a different kind of game and I can imagine it is a hit or miss, either you will have a bad time or you will enjoy it and have a lot of laughs, like we did.

There are very few rooms that combine horror and humor, I can think of only a few from Spain, and I have always enjoyed them a lot. In several rooms in Spain, also non-horror ones there is teasing from the actors/gms and I have also found this idea funny if well-done. I think Horror Club goes a little bit along those lines, although with less puzzles than a classical escape room. If you want to experience a different game and the aspects I mentioned do not put you off, I can only recommend to try it. For those of you who in addition to escape enthusiasts are also into BDSM, this might be the best game of your life. In that case make sure to book the extreme version, though.