Room Escape Artist

Zoltar Speaks is one of the best escape rooms in The Netherlands. Here are our recommendations for other great escape rooms in The Netherlands.

Fortune favors the bold 🔮

Location:  Hilversum, Netherlands

Date Played: February 27, 2025

Team Size: 2-5; we recommend 2-4

Duration: 75 minutes

Price: €179 per team

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: All players must crawl

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Escape Cafe’s Zoltar Speaks whisked us back in time to an exquisite 15th-century Middle Eastern market. With dramatic contrasts in tone and texture, this unforgettable adventure offered a rare balance of cozy, calm, and exhilarating moments.

Zoltar Speaks was a unique, narrative-centric take on a relatively uncommon escape room theme. It stood out equally for its dazzling set design, strong sense of adventure, and dynamic gameplay.

From start to finish, the emotional arc in Zoltar Speaks was thoughtfully paced. Both the gameplay and environmental intensity embodied an impressive dynamic range that’s frankly quite rare for escape rooms. In music, a crescendo must start quietly enough to have space to grow effectively, and similarly, the moments where Zoltar Speaks cultivated a calmer, quieter sense of magic enabled the swells that followed to truly shine. This included a particularly innovative segment where our choices meaningfully altered the story we got to live out.

There are a number of potential risks when creating an escape room centered around a culture that’s not your own, but Escape Cafe handled this theme responsibly. By placing us in a fantasy historical setting, ensuring any Arabic language was real and functional, and avoiding religious topics, Zoltar Speaks largely avoided putting us in a position to otherize or overly exotify this culture. Our primary objective was wholesome, helping other people in a small and targeted way.

This magnificent experience was a standout amongst standouts, a game well worth traveling for that’s in remarkably close proximity to so many other games worth traveling for. While many of the top escape rooms around the Hague tend toward religious horror, those around Amersfoort are increasingly more varied in theme and setting. Zoltar Speaks reinforced this trend, and I hope in their future experiences, Escape Cafe will continue to embrace unusual, playful, and magical adventures over the grimmer themes that are already plentiful in the region.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Scenery snobs
• Puzzle lovers
• Any experience level

Why play?

• A gorgeous and expansive – yet also cozy – set
• Smooth, creative gameplay
• Fun interactions that allow you to play the part however you want

Story

We entered an antiques shop where we’d heard that an enchanted old Zoltar machine might be able to transport us back in time to the 15th century. There, we were tasked with an important mission: to aid the impoverished market venders in their peaceful resistance against the sultan.

Setting

Zoltar Speaks opened in a cozy antiques shop, the sort that’s densely filled with mysterious objects that each clearly tell a story. The space was meticulously curated without feeling cluttered. In the corner sat an old Zoltar fortune-telling machine. As the game progressed, patterned fabrics and colorful glass lamps contributed to the realism and warmth.

Gameplay

Escape Cafe’s Zoltar Speaks was a standard escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around making connections, solving puzzles, and scheming.

Analysis

➕ Zoltar Speaks cultivated a strong sense of wonder and adventure across multiple gorgeous sets. By subdividing small and large spaces efficiently and giving us peeks into future zones, the world felt particularly grand and interconnected. The experience used lighting, sound, smell, and texture to further deepen the immersion.

➖ At the very start, we encountered a lock that jammed and required outside assistance when we turned a key the wrong way, with no indication of the correct direction. We may have just gotten unlucky and we haven’t heard from other teams who’ve encountered this, but if this is a recurring issue, we hope it’ll be fixed with a different lock or even just a small arrow.

➕ The gameplay was deeply enjoyable, prompting us to engage with the space in creative and tactile ways. There were a variety of interaction styles, including some carefully cultivated moments of calmness which gave space for the subsequent moments of excitement to shine.

➕ Zoltar Speaks ensured that we both felt and looked the part. Small details went a long way.

➖ A depiction of the titular Zoltar character fell flat for us. It wasn’t bad; it just wasn’t quite up to the level of vivid dimensionality we’d come to expect throughout the rest of the experience.

➕/➖ A classic game added an exhilarating twist to a series of puzzles while also telling a story. We appreciated how the environment elegantly added tension, though the additional inclusion of a more explicit countdown felt redundant.

➕ Zoltar Speaks included one of the smoothest sensory puzzles I’ve encountered in an escape room. It made sense for the setting, involved a diegetic action, had a clear 1-to-1 mapping, and actually smelled really nice! It was refreshing to interact with real spices rather than stiflingly artificial aromas.

➕ A moment of low-tech mechanical manipulation was satisfying and appropriate for the time period. Even after one of my teammates was successful, I reset the mechanism so I could try it myself.

➕/➖ A layered puzzle cleverly connected multiple spaces, objects, and data sources. It was fun to solve, though there was an opportunity to further push the design by building upon past linguistic learnings, as well as ensuring that two inputs were a bit more easily distinguishable.

➕ Zoltar Speaks crafted a brilliant roleplay segment that enables each team to personalize their actions around their own strengths and preferences. Through a sequence of small, meaningful, and thoroughly magical choices, we made the story our own. Not all players needed to participate equally, yet there were opportunities for us each to have a unique and important role. After playing, we learned that the gameplay was designed to flex even more than we realized, seamlessly accommodating everyone from kids to horror fans. From a separate playthrough, REA Contributor Theresa Wagner reported that when she pushed a dramatic scene to its limits, their actor went above and beyond in playfully embodying a “yes, and” approach.

➕ The finale delivered on its core premise, then supported us in celebrating our victory. Together, the story and gameplay set us up to be heroes in a small yet meaningful way. Too many escape rooms lead to unbelievable “save the world” objectives; in contrast, Zoltar Speaks demonstrated that even in a spectacular environment, a more people-centric objective can land strongly.

Tips For Visiting

• There is a Q-Park garage across the street from Escape Cafe.
• Escape Cafe is not, in fact, a cafe, but we enjoyed a meal at Ninh Binh Hilversum, a Vietnamese restaurant just around the corner.

Book your hour with Escape Cafe’s Zoltar Speaks, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.