Trip Trap is a world-class escape room company that is quite possibly the closest thing to a real-life fairytale that I’ve ever encountered.
This applies both to their idyllic setting in Geneva, Switzerland, as well as to the transportive theming, hyperrealistic set design, and creative play styles that they’ve cultivated across their many experiences.
Trip Trap currently has 3 locations, all within a 15-minute drive of each other in Geneva:
- Grand Trip Trap Hotel
- Trip Trap Bazar
- Trip Trap Secret Floor
While each of these locations contains fantastic worlds worth exploring, their signature venue — the Grand Trip Trap Hotel — is on another level entirely. With multiple Golden Lock Award-winning and TERPECA Top 100 games in the same building, this location is unequivocally a destination worth traveling to visit for anyone who loves escape rooms.
We covered 3 of these experiences in depth:
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the Grand Trip Trap Hotel as a venue, and then dive into some of Trip Trap’s other immersive offerings.
A Stay at the Grand Trip Trap Hotel
The Grand Trip Trap Hotel may not be an actual hotel, but if they ever offered overnight stays, I’d make a booking in a heartbeat.
The concept for this venue brilliantly embodied the idea of “finding wonder in the mundane” — whisking us into the everyday lives of the hotel’s various fictional residents, each of which at first seemed fairly ordinary… but there was no shortage of the extraordinary just beneath the surface. While these residents all existed in the same world, with some light cross-references, there was no continuous story or preferable play order. Nonetheless, the individual experiences were quite narrative-driven, and I would have loved to have seen slightly more scaffolding tying everything together, such as a family tree.
Trip Trap’s set design throughout the venue was notably polished and realistic, spanning the experiences themselves as well as the hotel lobby and adjoining restaurant and bar. The aesthetic was at once elegant, stately, and whimsical, frequently reaching off-the-charts levels of verisimilitude. The skill, creativity, and production budget that went into crafting these worlds was truly staggering.
In between and after our games, we enjoyed hanging out at the bar. The cocktails and beers were top notch, and it offered a comfortable place to rest and debrief. I was impressed to see that the restaurant was also popular with locals who weren’t there for escape rooms.
Mr Trippolyte’s Cinema
Location: Grand Trip Trap Hotel
From start to finish, Mr Trippolyte’s Cinema lived up to its cinematic premise. This game was bursting with 1980s nostalgia, and fans of films and pop culture from that era will be especially enamored. The narrative was clearly and effectively communicated across multiple mediums, paying loving tribute to very specific source material. This translated into the gameplay as well, transforming toys and everyday objects into creative puzzles with an internally consistent “kid logic” that breathed life and soul into the world.
The production quality extended beyond the physical. I absolutely adored an over-the-top short film that opened the game, and the experience was bookended with some tasteful end credits which showcased just how many creative minds went into the making of this experience.
Of all the offerings at the Grand Trip Trap Hotel, Mr Trippolyte’s Cinema was certainly not small… but it was the smallest one there. There were scenes when my team of 5 was prohibitively cramped, and this game would be best experienced with 2-4 players.
The Antiquary’s Testament
Location: Trip Trap Bazar
With The Antiquary’s Testament, Trip Trap took some common tropes — a will and an antiques store — and turned them into a grand adventure, filled with mysterious artifacts and unexpected twists and turns.
The set design was realistic and yet somehow also fantastical. It felt like a strange, dusty shop you’d stumble into on a stormy night that somehow exists for you, and only you, to discover its dark secrets. Trip Trap’s prop sourcing was authentic and eclectic, just appropriative enough to harken back to a different era of anthropological adventure. I enjoyed the gameplay throughout, and especially certain segments that took advantage of the interesting layout of the space. The experience continuously layered on itself, leading into an exciting finale.
An Evening with the Voodoo Queen
Location: Trip Trap Secret Floor
Within Trip Trap’s evolution as an escape room company, An Evening with the Voodoo Queen fell squarely at the intersection of styles. In many senses, it resembled a “classic escape room” more than Trip Trap’s newer, more ambitiously immersive productions. Yet, for me, it was kind of the best of both worlds: a strongly puzzle-centric game with some of the most creative and satisfying puzzles across Trip Trap’s entire catalog, alongside thoughtful experimentation in narrative and theatrical immersion. The gameplay and props showed their age, but were also quite well maintained.
An Evening with the Voodoo Queen was a classic escape room done really well, and for me, it absolutely still held up. When traveling to play escape rooms, it can be tempting to only play the newest and fanciest, but I find it’s essential to also see where a company has been to know where they’re going. And sometimes, that leads to playing some stellar bonus games in the process, like An Evening with the Voodoo Queen.
The Chest: Rackham’s Revenge
Location: Trip Trap Secret Floor
The Chest: Rackham’s Revenge was a last-minute addition to my team’s itinerary, but it ended up being a surprise standout of the day. Whereas Trip Trap’s newer experiences flexed their set design chops and strove for end-to-end immersion, The Chest: Rackham’s Revenge was all about the puzzles — and those puzzles were an absolute blast.
Contained within a massive chest, this game was jam-packed with tactile satisfaction, enjoyable process puzzles, and some rather clever ahas. For a small team, there was plenty to do, and a wide variety of puzzle styles to keep all players involved. We stayed in an exhilarating flow state the entire time.
But this wasn’t just an isolated box of puzzles in an empty room. While The Chest: Rackham’s Revenge is sometimes offered as a mobile escape room, the more permanent version we experienced was situated in an elegant gallery of sorts, with various display cases and framed artwork around the perimeter. Teams are split in half, with 2 identical copies of the box, and the experience is presented as a friendly competition.
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