Saudade

Saudade – a Portuguese word with no real equivalent in English. It describes that peculiar emotional cocktail of love, longing, melancholy and nostalgia you feel when thinking of something or someone you’ve lost and can never fully get back. It’s no coincidence that Free City’s escape game in Hangzhou carries exactly this name, because whoever leaves the room takes precisely that feeling with them.

What sets Saudade apart isn’t elaborate set design or intricate puzzle mechanics, but the sheer emotional weight of its story, carried by acting performances rarely seen in an escape room.

The story follows Fred across three acts. In the first act, we witness his happy early years with his wife Yuna, young love, Christmas, the birth of their daughter, a moment of pure happiness Fred has no way of knowing yet how precious it will become. In the second act, he loses Yuna and is left to raise their daughter alone, a girl suffering from a genetic illness. He spends everything he has on her treatment, numbs his own pain with alcohol, and carries the guilt entirely on his own. In the third act, we finally see Fred as an old man, marked by Alzheimer’s, slowly losing everything, his memories, his words, almost everything, except the feeling for his daughter. Three actors carry this story, interrupted again and again by flashbacks that pull us back and forth through time.

One particularity of Saudade that only became clear to us during the game: our group of six was split into Team Fred and Team Yuna, each seeing partly different scenes and perspectives. That’s why this game requires two translators, one per team, so nobody misses anything.

While the proportion of purely theatrical scenes, in which we were mostly observers, was fairly high, Saudade also has its action-packed moments and medium-scale mechanics that can genuinely leave you dizzy. But what stayed with us most wasn’t the physical intensity, it was the emotional one: by the final scene, I truly came close to tears.

The secret star of the evening, though, was little Dobby, Fred’s daughter. A girl who looked about five years old, and who we only learned afterward was actually 19. The whole time, I kept wondering how she managed to be so flawless with her lines and portray such a wide range of emotions so convincingly. Her performance was simply phenomenal.

Having played Bad Machine shortly before Saudade, the contrast couldn’t have been starker. Bad Machine is a hands-on game, loud, action-packed, with real tasks, running, sweating, a touch of dark humor. Saudade is the exact opposite, quiet, slow, deeply emotional, and we spent most of it as spectators rather than actors. Where Bad Machine entertains, Saudade moves you. Two completely different games, each impressive in its own way, but anyone traveling to Hangzhou to play both should brace for two very different evenings emotionally.

Saudade, by the way, wasn’t the only game dealing with Alzheimer’s on our China trip. Goodbye Diana from Grey Raven in Chengdu tackled the same theme, we briefly touched on it in our podcast episode about China, and a full review is still to come.