Room Escape Artist

Don’t Take a Breath is one of the best escape rooms in Athens, Greece. Here are our recommendations for other great escape rooms in Athens.

Hide & Seek Loot

Location:  Athens, Greece

Date Played: February 2, 2025

Team size: 2-6; we recommend 3-4

Duration: 120 minutes

Price: from 60€ per player for teams of 2 to 28€ per player for teams of 6

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration:  Players needs to be able to go up and down stairs and crawl. There is also a strobe light.

Emergency Exit Rating: We were locked in various spaces within the game. We’re unsure what fire escape measures there were, if any.

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Don’t Take a Breath appeared like it was based on the 2016 horror film, Don’t Breathe. The game and the film had identical plots featuring degenerates robbing a blind veteran, with the game really capturing the look, feel, and some of the tone of the movie… although the game dropped the violence in favor of a kinder player experience.

I’ve never played another game quite like Don’t Take a Breath; it was basically a robbery larp. There were essentially no puzzles. Everything we did was in service of breaking and entering… and getting ourselves out. The actions that the game asked us to take almost always felt real and grounded in real world actions.

The setting helped to facilitate the realness of the experience, because it looked like we were in a real person’s home. It was a wild concept.

Where things fell a bit flat for me in Don’t Take a Breath were the consequences of interacting with the menacing character that we found along the way. We encountered this menace far too early for the Verone to maintain the intensity throughout the game. As a result, we felt like the game should have ended a lot earlier than it did.

Overall, I loved Don’t Take a Breath, but I wish that the intensity slowly built longer, and that the payoff was shorter and more intense. We reached a point where we got comfortable in the game’s world and that’s never a good thing in a thriller. Nevertheless, if you’re in Greece, I highly recommend Don’t Take a Breath because it does what so many Greek horror games strive to do, but it did it in a way that felt more subtle and less in your face.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Story seekers
• Scenery snobs
• Improvisors
• Best for players with at least some experience

Why play?

• Incredible on-boarding and early game
• The setting and game layout was as surprising as it was cool
• A novel approach to escape room gameplay

Story

It was going to be the perfect heist. Easy money. Our contact had the keys, the security codes… everything. All that we had to do was break in and steal some money from a blind man. What our contact failed to mention was that the blind man was a Desert Storm veteran, former special forces.

Setting

Don’t Take a Breath was massive, and Verone used the large space to build a world that felt very real. While the spaces that we explored in Don’t Take a Breath were common spaces, the execution felt completely authentic. We never felt like we were in an escape room set. We felt like we were in a neighborhood and someone’s home.

Gameplay

Verone’s Don’t Take a Breath was a theatrical thriller escape room with a low level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around searching, navigating the space, character interactions, and completing tasks.

Analysis

➕ The adrenaline-pumping set up for this experience was a strong opening. We had a mission to complete in an unknown environment. We each had our roles. It was more developed that most escape room heists. This added intensity and purpose to the experience.

➕ The set was expansive… and it just kept opening up in unexpected ways. It had a sense of place. In each scene, the set looked and felt authentic.

➖ We struggled to buy into the fiction when we kept getting caught, with no real consequences. Don’t Take a Breath captured us too early and too often for this mechanic to have meaningful stakes.

➕ Don’t Take a Breath was very responsive to our actions. It was fast-paced. If we solved quickly (which we did), it kept pace with us. (Ok, occasionally our gamemaster tried to slow us down, but only to make sure they could deliver the full experience. They did this fully in character.) We were never left wandering, with no clear direction or purpose. By keeping us in action, the experience kept some level of intensity throughout.

➖ There was an opportunity for the mechanics of play to develop over the 2-hour experience. Our relationship to the character never evolved. While a story was revealed through the experience, and we learned more about the characters, it wasn’t as emotionally resonant as it could have been.

➖ We wished Don’t Take a Breath had crescendoed into the finale. The scenes leading up to the finale had a lot of starting and stopping. 

➕ Verone set clear expectations for what Don’t Take a Breath was (thriller) and what is was not (puzzles). The gameplay was almost entirely on rails, which won’t be everyone’s taste. That said, Don’t Take a Breath never tried to be anything else but what Verone intended it to be.

Tips For Visiting

• It looked like there was street parking, but we aren’t sure.

Book your hour with Verone’s Don’t Take a Breath, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.