Room Escape Artist

Tokyo Lab is one of Belgium’s best escape rooms. Here are our other escape room recommendations in Belgium.

Viral marketing

Location:  Brussels, Belgium

Date Played: March 4, 2025

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

Duration: 70 minutes

Price: €160 for 3 players to €190 for 6 players

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: Some players must crawl

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Escape Rush’s Tokyo Lab stood out for its top-notch set design. The game’s opening act transported us to the streets of Tokyo with colorful hanging lanterns and a dizzying density of storefronts. As the game progressed, we left the street and pivoted to the “lab” part of Tokyo Lab. Through the entirety of the game, Escape Rush used height to their advantage in their construction of detailed environments.

While the scenery was consistently alluring, the experience itself left us wanting more. Tokyo Lab chained together multiple disparate themes, and the lab no longer looked or felt like we were in Japan. The gameplay styles also differed in each of these segments, ranging from small search tasks to screen-based mini-games. Each of these interactions had potential, yet almost none felt sufficiently developed, leading to choppy flow that constantly had us questioning the motivations for our actions. Contrasting with the grandiose scale of the set, many of our interactions felt comparatively small.

Additionally, in the post-pandemic era, the thematic choice to connect a deadly virus to an East Asian setting has not aged particularly well, especially when the gameplay effectively trivializes the “solving” of such a situation. This is not to say that pandemic- or lab-themed escape rooms can’t still exist, but they’ll land differently for different players.

With their Golden Lock Award-winning Botanist Manor, Escape Rush has become a destination for escape room enthusiasts visiting Belgium. Playing both Tokyo Lab and The White House, it was clear that Escape Rush has prioritized scenic design and immersion since the start of their journey, but the quality of gameplay wasn’t fully there yet in these earlier experiences, making the improvements across all categories in Botanist Manor all the more impressive by comparison.

Who is this for?

• Scenery snobs
• Any experience level

Why play?

• Beautiful, expansive set design

Story

We infiltrated a secret lab in Tokyo in order to neutralize a deadly virus that had originated there.

Setting

Tokyo Lab began on the streets of Tokyo. Multiple storefronts were decorated with Japanese advertisements and brightly lit signs. Glowing lanterns and tree branches adorned the area above us. Alongside the various restaurants and shops was the entrance to the Genedine Pharmaceutical Biotech Center.

Gameplay

Escape Rush’s Tokyo Lab was a standard escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around searching, solving puzzles, and playing minigames.

Analysis

➕/❓ The intro video for Tokyo Lab was action-packed and beautifully produced. I appreciated a multi-sensory entrance into the briefing space, though while playing multiple games back-to-back at Escape Rush, the novelty somewhat wore off after experiencing the exact same effects each time. Small changes in audio or lighting could help to differentiate each experience at Escape Rush.

➕ Tokyo Lab had a large and attractive set that made great use of its height, especially in its opening scene. This environment looked great in person, and it looked even better in photos, leading to some of our best looking team photos from our entire Benelux escape room trip.

➖ Small search-based interactions didn’t take advantage of the beautiful opening space and left most players with little to do. We wanted to spend more time puzzling and engaging with this densely detailed environment.

➖ A segment of crawling was more physically uncomfortable than it needed to be, though it was not necessary for all players to participate.

➕/➖ A transition into a new space wowed us with scale, but an underwhelming lighting effect overstayed its welcome.

➕/➖ We enjoyed the interplay between digital and physical elements in one segment. However, a questionable racial stereotype felt random and out of place.

➖ Many of the puzzles in Tokyo Lab were based around interesting ideas and interfaces, but they were lacking in finesse. A potential communication puzzle was instead an arbitrary guess-and-check task. A high-energy competitive sequence was fun, but without any sensible narrative context, left us scratching our heads. A thematic logic puzzle was held back by an overly finicky interface with unclear save states.

➕/➖ The gameplay gradually opened up, building to a series of varied communication-centric mini-games. We enjoyed playfully butting heads under pressure, though we questioned if some screen-based interactions could have been integrated into the physical environment instead.

Tips For Visiting

• Tokyo Lab is playable in French or English.

Book your hour with Escape Rush’s Tokyo Lab, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.