Welcome to this tiny fifth-floor Airbnb, your home for the next four days in a major European city. Can you escape without incurring additional fees for cleaning or damage?
Let the games begin.
First, you must open this rusty lockbox containing the apartment keys. The numbers have worn off the keypad, and the latch sticks, so you may have to lightly smash it with a rock. However, if you damage the lockbox, you will be charged a €300 replacement fee.
Hear that ominous clunk? It means either that you are about to plummet to your death in this coffin-sized elevator or that it’s functioning normally.
In this bedroom are fourteen light switches. Ten of them do nothing. One turns on the television, which will blast Eurovision at top volume. One sounds an alarm in the home of your grouchy next-door neighbor who hates Americans and will let his French bulldog poop on your doorstep. One notifies the trash collectors on the street outside that you would like them to crush glass beneath your window. Only one activates the tiny IKEA lamp at your bedside. Can you choose the right one in time?
You have touched the thermostat. You will be charged a €150 fee.
Do you want to play the game of laundry? Can you find the correct energy-efficient setting that will wash your clothes in only six hours? One wrong choice begins a cycle that takes seventeen hours and leaves a permanent orange residue on your clothes. Another will dissolve your clothes in acid. Another wrong choice will reduce the already-low water pressure of the entire building to a trickle; your downstairs neighbor, who hates Americans, will then let her Papillon poop on your doorstep. The washer manual is hidden somewhere in this IKEA cabinet filled with outdated guidebooks, erotic photography, and biographies of Enrique Iglesias. Good luck.
Now you must use the toilet. Do you press the big button or the little one? Is it supposed to make that noise?
Under the kitchen sink are four trash bins: green for recycling, blue for food waste, blue-green for non-recycling non-food waste, and a green-blue bin marked only with a picture of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Failure to properly sort your trash will result in a €200 fee. Think carefully before you dispose of that Cornetto wrapper.
Do you need a hint? Then you must face the bidet. You must—no, you’re leaving? Not even gonna try?
Looking for the extra key? It’s hidden somewhere in this IKEA basket filled with power adapters. Some are European, some are Asian, and some are from former Soviet republics. The spiky one recharges wands from Hogwarts. Can you sort through them and find the FIFA keychain without contracting tetanus?
You have stepped in the poop of your American-hating neighbor’s Australian shepherd. Can you clean it off your shoes well enough to avoid tracking it into the apartment, or will you face the €400 cleaning fee?
The door buzzer sounds. It’s Werner Herzog, offering to come up and help you decipher the train schedule. Should you let him in? What if he’s been filming a groundbreaking documentary about arrogant American tourists and wants to get footage of you struggling to read a map? Is that a hidden camera behind the Le Chat Noir poster?
Your challenge: Cook a meal in this kitchenette equipped with one dull knife, a moka coffee pot, a corkscrew, an electric kettle that turns water green, and a life-sized cardboard cutout of Gérard Depardieu. Any breakage, scratches, scorches, dustings, or overlong stares will result in a €500 fee.
You have activated the smoke alarm. You will be charged a €1,000 fee, receive a one-star rating, and all of the American-hating neighbors are calling Interpol. Werner Herzog can be heard narrating your plight outside the door. You lose.
