Room Escape Artist

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

A Golden Key for exemplary service

Location:  Volkel, Netherlands

Date Played: February 28, 2024

Team Size: exactly 2 players

Duration: 80 minutes

Price: €90 per team

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: At least one player must briefly climb and crawl

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

In many regards, The Concierge was my ideal escape room format: a puzzle-centric, 80-minute experience with a unique narrative throughline, designed for exactly 2 players. The puzzles were tactile, elegant, and satisfying. Every tiny detail was considered.

Not every escape room needs to serve every audience, and The Concierge demonstrated an abundant awareness of their intended audience — puzzle lovers who seek an intimate, active experience. This type of experience is quite unusual within the global escape room market. While most escape rooms are technically playable with just 2 players, they’re almost never designed or priced with smaller teams in mind.

Stylistically, The Concierge was also an outlier within the regional Benelux escape room market, with a focus on characters and puzzles over adventure and spectacle. That’s not to say that The Concierge didn’t have its fair share of “wow” moments; they just took different forms.

All 3 rooms at Hotel Veloria blew me away, and together, they make this escapist hotel an international destination worth traveling to visit. If you’re touring the Netherlands with a 4-player team, it might be tempting to only play Lost and Found and Kamer 237. However, I highly encourage you to extend your stay, split into duos, and apply for the position of The Concierge. As a bonus, you can enjoy a range of light food and drinks in Hotel Veloria’s lounge while waiting for your other teammates to complete their interview.

It is extra fitting for The Concierge to receive a Golden Lock Award, as Hotel Veloria’s concierge was a member of the aptly named Les Clefs d’Or, or “The Golden Keys” — a real professional organization for hotel concierges that played a fairly prominent role in the experience.

Who is this for?

• Puzzle lovers
• Story seekers
• Best for players with at least some experience

Why play?

• You like playing escape rooms as a duo
• Satisfying puzzles
• A unique premise and setting

Story

We arrived at Hotel Veloria to interview for the newly available position of hotel concierge.

Setting

The Concierge took place in the office of Karel Koperslager, the recently fired concierge of Hotel Veloria. The space was carefully organized, balancing the stressful, detail-oriented environment with the calming sounds of classical radio.

Gameplay

Hotel Veloria’s The Concierge was a standard escape room with a moderate level of difficulty. The gameplay was designed for precisely 2 players, no more and no less.

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

Analysis

➕ As a 2-player escape room, The Concierge was a rare delicacy. We encountered a wide range of creative puzzle types that were solvable either in parallel or together. This mixture of modes set both players up for highly active individual roles throughout the entire experience, enabling us to sometimes go into introvert mode, quietly puzzling side by side, and other times requiring more communication.

➕ Hotel Veloria demonstrated a tremendous amount of restraint in limiting The Concierge to just 2 players, particularly given that the game’s footprint is far from small. I can’t imagine this was an optimal business decision, and it certainly limits the game’s audience to a degree. Yet, even if they could technically squeeze in another 1 or 2 players, as a lesser company absolutely would do, that would have led to a lesser experience.

➕ The setting was compelling in its mundane realism. The lived-in office of the hotel’s previous concierge housed a number of pieces of actual equipment used in hotel operations, like a key making machine and an old school printer, along with enjoyable character building, such as the former concierge’s love of classical music radio. Small, specific details brought the space and its inhabitants to life.

➕ The framing and transitions of The Concierge repeatedly blurred the boundaries between game and reality, elegantly taking advantage of Hotel Veloria’s hotel setting.

➕ Amidst a bounty of puzzles, The Concierge communicated a clear and nuanced narrative through beautifully produced video and audio clips. It was consistently evident when we were supposed to pause puzzling and pay attention to the story.

➕/➖ The Concierge was centered around our interview for the position of hotel concierge, with a particularly demanding manager conducting our interview. This narrative conceit was effective in maintaining a fun-stressful level of energy, appropriate for an interview. My team puzzled hard and enjoyed the accelerated pace, but this tone may land differently for different teams.

➕ A key component of the many satisfying puzzles that comprised The Concierge was the careful curation of diegetic objects.

➕ We enjoyed playing with an unusual interface that was jam-packed with small, narrative-centric aha moments.

➕ A personal twist used Hotel Veloria’s distinctive setting to their advantage. Just thinking about it gives me butterflies.

➕/❓ The Concierge included some interesting hint mechanisms that our team barely got to experience. I’m glad that we got stuck on a small search fail in the final act so that we could see how one type of hint was delivered. That said, I wonder whether Hotel Veloria could find a way to weave more of these interactions into the core gameplay, providing more flexible levers for gamemasters to have fun with teams regardless of how much assistance they need.

➕/➖ The finale creatively tied together the story and gameplay, with space for players to make it their own. The success of this ending was dependent on how well the gamemaster committed to the bit, and there was an opportunity to heighten the theatrics — without needlessly raising the stakes — to better anchor the plot of The Concierge back in Hotel Veloria’s overarching world.

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 The Concierge, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.