About Hotel Fortuna 1923
Hotel Fortuna 1923 is an escape room for adults with an atmospheric ghost story – perfect for the office party, New Year’s Eve, a night with friends or team building. It is New Year’s Eve 1923 in a grand seaside hotel. The orchestra takes a break, and then you hear it: a gramophone is playing behind the door to Room 13. That door has been locked for 30 years, ever since the hotel’s owner, the magician Aurelio Fortuna, vanished without a trace on New Year’s Eve 1893.
You explore the lobby, the ballroom, the first-floor corridor and finally Room 13 itself. Along the way you turn the lift’s floor dial using the guest book and the telegrams, work out the order of the evening’s dances from the dance card, calculate when a dance begins, read the rhythm of the hotel’s bell board, read a clock that only exists in the mirror and decode the tiny knocks in the gramophone record. At the end, four playing cards and five dances open the magician’s trunk.
It is an online escape room, but you play together in the same room. The puzzles are hard, and most of them can only be solved by putting several clues together. If you play on a TV, guest books, telegrams and notes are handed out to your phones, so you have to talk to each other. The mood is spooky in the cosy way – no scares, no blood – and the story has a warm explanation. The help button gives three levels of hints, and the solutions are new every time.
How to play
- Gather the team around the iPad, or put the hotel on the TV and get your phones out.
- Read the letter in the envelope on the reception desk. It tells you what to look for.
- Tap things in the picture to take a closer look, and switch between the hotel’s rooms with the buttons at the top. The first floor and Room 13 open up along the way.
- Tap an item in the bag and then something in the room to use it. Tap an item twice to look at it more closely.
- Find the four playing cards and the trunk key, and open Master Fortuna’s trunk before the clock strikes twelve. Tap Hint if you get stuck.