Room Escape Artist

Lost and Found is one of the best escape rooms in The Netherlands. Here are our recommendations for other great escape rooms in The Netherlands.

Emotional baggage 🧳

Location:  Volkel, Netherlands

Date Played: February 28, 2024

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

Duration: 80 minutes

Price: €165 per team

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: All players must climb stairs

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Lost and Found moved me in ways that few escape rooms ever have.

Through its gameplay, Lost and Found brought to life a number of nuanced characters and vivid emotions. And the setting — a surreal dream world cobbled together from memory fragments — also itself felt like a living, breathing character. Hotel Veloria (previously known as Kamer 237) layered each of these elements onto each other to create a remarkable experience that was detailed, clever, sentimental, and deeply poetic.

Lost and Found particularly excelled in puzzle design. Throughout much of the game, puzzle ahas and narrative ahas were one and the same. In this sense, the puzzles were an organic extension of the experience’s environmental storytelling, working hand-in-hand to bring a unique world to life. Many puzzles were also interesting just as puzzles, outside of their narrative context, and we encountered multiple puzzle types that we’d loved to have continued playing long past the game’s end.

Lost and Found was perhaps the closest that I’ve found to Scout Expedition Co.’s The Nest in escape room form. Both experiences depicted non-literal settings in which stories effortlessly emerged from objects and memories, like in a hazy dream. Lost and Found proved that escape rooms can be a dynamic canvas for more mature, more specific, more emotional storytelling. Furthermore, leaning into puzzles — rather than just simple narrative tasks — is a valid direction for escape rooms. Players are intelligent, they should be treated as such, and they can rise to the occasion.

I am obsessed with Lost and Found. It is the sort of experience that I’d send puzzle-loving immersive or video game enthusiasts to in order to convince them to take escape rooms more seriously as a creative medium. If you find yourself in any or all of these categories, it is worth traveling from far and wide to experience the enigmatic alchemy that Hotel Veloria has concocted in Lost and Found, as well as The Concierge and Kamer 237. All 3 games are remarkably strong offerings that are not to be missed. Hotel Veloria may be far away from just about every other escape room in the Netherlands, but it is well worth the trip.

Who is this for?

• Story seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Scenery snobs
• Best for players with at least some experience
• Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle

Why play?

• A detailed, unique setting
• Refined integration of narrative and gameplay
• Creative, layered puzzles

Story

Our missing suitcase had been found at Hotel Veloria. We visited the hotel to pick it up.

Setting

Lost and Found took us to Hotel Veloria’s lost and found department. A towering collage of old, forgotten suitcases dominated a multi-story display. The various lost items peeking out, from ballet shoes to musical instruments, hinted at the numerous stories hidden all around us.

Gameplay

Hotel Veloria’s Lost and Found was a standard escape room with a high level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around solving puzzles and making connections.

Analysis

➕ The set design in Lost and Found was instantly striking and thoroughly original, spanning multiple stories — and multiple stories — throughout the hotel’s crowded lost and found department. Cleverly cobbled together from a wealth of old suitcases and other found objects, this scenic style combined the real and the surreal into a dynamic work of art.

➕ Lost and Found‘s puzzle design was nothing short of brilliant. Every puzzle had a reason for being there, creatively prompting us to engage with the personal belongings of strangers which consequently brought these characters to life in our minds and memories. Lighting, sound, and tactile interactivity provided impeccable feedback and confirmation each step of the way.

➕/➖  Our introduction into the world of Lost and Found involved a mix of live acting, pre-recorded video, and environmental exploration. I loved this framing, though there was an opportunity to streamline some of these details for improved clarity.

➕ A satisfying multi-step puzzle immediately taught us how this game wanted to be played, orienting us in the space while also immersing us in a plethora of small-stakes stories that naturally emerged from the objects all around us.

➕/➖  Lost and Found incorporated a number of short videos throughout the experience. With a high level of production quality and stellar acting, these films helped to hone the experience’s emotional impact. The central motif developed throughout a nonlinear segment was especially striking, and while our team ensured that all players returned to a central location to experience these moments together, we wished that the experience had been designed to guarantee this helpful linearity for all teams.

➕ A tactile adaptation of a grid-based logic puzzle variant was so much fun. This was a pristine example of how a paper-and-pencil puzzle format can be meaningfully adapted to a physical setting in a way that was 1) even more fun in its tactile form, 2) had a video game-like sense of variation and progression, and 3) made clear sense in the story.

➕/➖ A straightforward interaction also pleasantly added to the ambient soundtrack, yet it was lacking in depth relative to the other puzzles available in parallel and didn’t quite embody the connected character as strongly as some of the other threads.

➕ Hotel Veloria wove all 3 of their experiences into a richly interconnected world, both spatially and thematically. While these separate games weren’t explicitly part of the same story and weren’t necessarily designed to be played in sequence, they each referenced each other and made sense within the hotel’s framing.

➕/❓ The ending brought us to tears. Multiple threads converged, punctuated by a poignant narrative revelation. While complete and satisfying as is, we wondered whether the final puzzle could have directly combined not just the outputs but also the mechanics and emotions of the preceding paths to even greater effect.

Tips For Visiting

• There was a small parking lot.
• Hotel Veloria was previously named Kamer 237. The name was changed to avoid confusion with their first game, also named Kamer 237.

Book your hour with Hotel Veloria’s Lost and Found, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.