This one gets under your skin before you've figured out the rules. Yan comes back to his hometown, walks into the XY Escape Room, gets hooked on Xu, and from that moment the show stops letting you trust anything he sees. The illusions bleed outward until his friends are caught in them too, and the dread is built into the craft: the CGI and lighting do real work here, and the OST carries scenes that dialogue never bothers to explain. Fans of this one will tell you the opening and ending tracks alone earned repeat plays. Fair warning, the ending leaves threads dangling and questions unanswered, and reviewers have been vocal about it. But if you like a puzzle that keeps rearranging itself, this is the slept-on donghua people keep quietly recommending to each other.

Yan Yuechu moves back to his hometown for work and makes new friends at the company he joins. After a night of drinks, he and his colleague Hu Zhi duck out of the rain into XY, an escape game run by the mysterious Xu Aiyou, and Yan is drawn to her. Hints of Xu's troubled past inside the game stay with him, and eerie illusions begin to follow, some pulling in his friends. When a letter warns him away from escape games, Yan must work out where reality ends before he loses his sanity.