Room Escape Artist

Note: Stay in the Dark permanently closed in the Spring 2024.

Hide in plain fright

Location: Vlaardingen, Netherlands

Date Played: July 9, 2023

Team Size: 2-6; we recommend 3-5

Duration: 2.5 hours

Price: From 60 € per player

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: All players must be able to crawl, climb, and move quickly through dark, uneven environments. There are loud noises, flashing lights, intense situations, and heights.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

I’ve often passed by a creepy abandoned building and thought “someone should turn that into an escape room.” DarkPark’s Stay in the Dark fulfills on this lofty pipe dream, transforming an absolutely ginormous 4000 m² multi-story warehouse into a 2.5-hour immersive horror epic that feels spine-tinglingly real… because it is.

Blurring the lines between escape room, immersive theater, and urban exploration, Stay in the Dark took full advantage of the unique resources and constraints around which it was designed. Creating an experience like Stay in the Dark is impractical and improbable: past the initial herculean feat of gaining access to such a space, the logistical complexities of safely running this show are immense. While most escape room sets are created from scratch, the “set” of Stay in the Dark is curated — cleaned up, edited, and augmented — from a mostly already existing environment, playing on the salient features and the inherent ephemerality of the gamespace while also ensuring it is properly fitted with theatrical lighting, sound equipment, security cameras, and safety features.

But Stay in the Dark is so much more than just a massive space. What impressed me most about this experience was its artfully theatrical approach to immersive horror. After earning our trust in the opening act, DarkPark guided us on an emotional arc of anticipation, fear, and confrontation, all cinematically scaffolded by a lush original soundtrack. There was a strong narrative shape beyond just a binary on and off of intensity, of being chased or waiting to be chased. The game mechanics surrounding actor interactions meaningfully evolved as the experience progressed, gradually building our confidence and making it so that even a more timid player might become an action hero by the end.

Yes, Stay in the Dark is actively scary, but its aim truly is to tell a story and provide a safe and enjoyable experience for all players, not to terrorize and traumatize them. To that end, DarkPark embraces a horror style that they call “fun-scary.” In their own words:

“Stay in the Dark is our scariest experience yet, but we never cross your boundaries. We strive to build up tension in a fun way and carefully try to sense how far we can go. We therefore like to use the term ‘fun-scary’. So yes, it is scary and at times even very intense, but always with the aim that you have a great time and not that you come out with gray hair. You are going on an emotional journey.”

If you are strictly opposed to scary experiences, lack physical mobility, or have a strong fear of heights, Stay in the Dark is not the game for you. But if you have yet to dip your toes into more intense horror and are up for an unforgettable adventure, DarkPark genuinely stays true to this “fun-scary” mission statement. Demonstrating a remarkable flexibility and adaptability of the game’s design, my horror-loving and my more horror-averse teammates all had a fantastic experience, despite sharply contrasting play styles. Certain teammates who were tempted to tap out early on made it to the end and were glad they did.

Since its opening, Stay in the Dark has been accompanied by an expiration date, which sadly was just announced to be 3 months from now. If you are able to make it to the Netherlands by March 17, 2024, do not hesitate and get your tickets to Stay in the Dark as soon as possible. This singularly memorable slice of the DarkVerse is not to be missed.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Scenery snobs
• Story seekers
• Horror fans… and non-horror fans who are open to a more intense experience (especially if they have brave teammates)
• Any experience level

Why play?

• Intense yet approachable immersive horror
• An absolutely massive environment
• Top-notch acting
• Gorgeous musical scoring

Story

In an industrial area near Rotterdam, we went to check out a property listing for an abandoned warehouse. We were met by the real estate agent and our tour began…

Setting

Stay in the Dark took us to an abandoned 5-floor building next to an old fire station. The building was real. The industrial area surrounding it was real. The endless maze of doors, brutalist concrete walls, and heaps of chemical equipment and other random junk were all real.

Overlaid on all this, DarkPark added in lighting, sound, and various additional set pieces. In some scenes, this helped to highlight existing features of the environment. In others, it seamlessly extended and transformed the existing layout and aesthetic.

Gameplay

DarkPark’s Stay in the Dark was an immersive horror experience with puzzles with a low-to-moderate level of difficulty, depending on your ability to explore and puzzle under pressure.

Core gameplay revolved around exploring and physically traversing a sprawling space, interacting with a character, and solving simple puzzles and mini-games.

Analysis

➕/❓ Stay in the Dark took us on a truly brilliant emotional journey of anticipation and fear, all but guaranteeing that players emerge braver than when they started. Though it may sound like a contradiction, this approach to horror managed to be at once intense and accessible. Apart from a few moments of unnecessarily incessant strobe lighting, I observed no cheap or extraneous jump scares. That said, one of the first scenes of the game pushes the fear factor a bit harder than necessary, and I’d recommend that any players considering tapping out early on think twice about their decision. Once you’re out, there’s no going back in, and it’s worth it to stick it out to the end.

➕ Stay in the Dark was unbelievably vast. Knowing this going in, I feared that we might get lost or not know how to properly navigate the space, but these proved not to be issues whatsoever. From start to finish, the experience was impeccably signposted, and even in moments when we were meant to freely explore and get our bearings, it was consistently clear what to focus on. Furthermore, most interactions felt proportionately scaled to the size of the space, and it never felt like we were searching for a needle in a haystack.

➕ Fun agility-centric physical obstacles made us go “yay, we get to do this really cool thing!” You don’t need to be a Ninja Warrior to play Stay in the Dark, but all players should be comfortable with navigating dark, uneven spaces and segments of climbing and crawling.

➕ The original musical scoring throughout Stay in the Dark heightened the intensity and communicated a spectrum of emotions. Much like a great film soundtrack, this was music that you’d listen to on its own — and now you can.

➕ The experience started the moment we parked. While it would have been difficult to locate the game space on our own, DarkPark cleverly wove a tour of the surrounding area into the experience and turned a potentially awkward and confusing navigation process into a strong narrative framing.

➕ Despite straddling multiple genres, Stay in the Dark still felt rooted in escape rooms and had at least one puzzle per “level.” The most successful puzzles and interactions took full advantage of unique spacial layouts and utilized the actor as a game mechanic.

➖ Certain other puzzles felt more generic and failed to integrate as successfully with the environment and story. They were still logical, solvable, and well presented, but compared to the narrative clarity elsewhere in the experience, these puzzles felt like filler. This isn’t to say that puzzles in a horror experience needed to be hard or elaborate, but each is an opportunity to succinctly communicate meaning and guide players’ behaviors in distinct ways.

➕ Apart from the puzzly puzzles and the actor-driven puzzles, endurance becomes its own sort of puzzle. Clocking in at over 2 hours long, Stay in the Dark is consistently intense and physically engaging, and as such it can be quite exhausting. That said, the game was paced incredibly well and never felt like it dragged on.

➕ Swashbuckling theatrics and an oversized reveal all converged into a moment of cinematic sensory overload that’s forever burned into my memory.

➕ The final boss battle was epic on all levels, with a frantic video game-esque mechanic and a shocking revelation.

➖ One of the game’s core mechanics was built around a narrative premise which could have been more consistently established and developed throughout, especially in the opening scene and a late-game display. Rather than leaving a certain connection open-ended, players would feel more agency in the story if they could actively piece together the evidence rather than having it passively spoon-fed to them at the end.

➕ DarkPark had many measures in place to ensure that Stay in the Dark was safe, even in moments where it was made to feel quite edgy and risky. The experience may feel like real urban exploration, but it is closer to a tightly run theatrical production where the players are the main characters. The actors are in constant communication with behind-the-scenes staff, who are effectively serving as all-seeing stage managers. Especially after getting a peek behind the curtain of operations, I had a high level of confidence in how closely every part of the experience was being monitored and maintained.

Tips For Visiting

• There is a parking lot. You will be met by a character there and led to your primary destination.
• Make sure all players on your team are physically mobile and know what they’re getting themselves into. Wear clothes and footwear that you’re comfortable moving around in and potentially getting dirty.
• Review our tips for playing escape rooms with actors, and…

Update 10/8/24: If you want to hear more about Stay in the Dark, back us on Patreon at the “Search Win!” level to get access to a Spoilers Club Episode about this game. Reality Escape Pod co-hosts David and Peih-Gee talk all about it with the creators, spoilers and all.

Disclosure: DarkPark comped our tickets for this game.

For more from creator Gijs Geers, listen to him on REPOD: