Escape Rooms Suffolk: The Jungle

Our second game at Escape Rooms Suffolk was The Jungle, at time of writing their latest. The premise here is that you’ve crash-landed, and have an hour in which to transmit your position to a rescue helicopter before it runs short of fuel and decides to abandon you.

There’s a secondary goal here though. Contacting the helicopter is the official win condition for the game, but as a bonus objective you can also attempt to retrieve treasure from the jungle ruins.

Our hosts described this as a more puzzle-driven room than The Church, and that was my impression too; there’s plenty to solve and the puzzles are meatier. However, that doesn’t come at the expense of narrative or presentation. This is a lush, atmospheric recreation of a jungle, with puzzles that tie in with the setting and the story. I particularly liked the way things came together to complete the game’s primary goal.

There’s a clear separation between the first half and the second, though both are equally strong. I’d question one of the puzzles used later on, as being a type that some players may just get frustratingly stuck on, and which can become a bottleneck since only one person can really work on it at a time. But that’s the exception though, and it’s used at a point where there’s plenty of other tasks to work on in parallel.

Teams of four will have better chances of completing this game than teams of two, but win or lose it should be a dramatic and memorable conclusion. I’m really quite impressed at what they’ve been able to build here – I’ve known much larger companies with significantly larger budgets that don’t manage to create environments as convincing and entertaining as this one. Even more than the Church, there’s a reason this game is getting such good reviews; you should make strenuous efforts to go play it.