Fakenham Escape Rooms: Disaster Strikes

Room is borderline playable, host completely ruined experience.

This room contains some interesting original elements, mainly because the owner's father was themselves a member of an intenational search and rescue crew, and it includes some of his genuine S&R equipment. It is clearly a passion project and has an interesting hand-made charm. 

Our host was the owner's son, who had also designed and installed all the tech elements in the build, and the family run both the escape rooms upsatirs as well as the bowling alley below. 

So it definitely had an original, family-run charm. That said, there were some elements that didn't feel perhaps quite as polished or professional as we might have come to expect from other rooms. 

There is no online booking system, for example - the only communication we were able to make was via Facebook messenger. When we arrived, the host welcomed us and was friendly enough, although perhaps a little socially awkward - after standing around for a while we actually had to asked whether we could start playing the room now? (we had thought maybe there was a team before us that were running late or something, but no... it just seemed like the host wasn't in any hurry!).

And, after completing the room, we had a very detailed breakdown of how long it took us to solve every individual puzzle, and comparisons to every other team, medians and standard deviations, etc. which, while interesting to a data nerd (which I absolutely am!), was rather overwhelming for a casual player... I think it was based on a data collection system that the owner had created and was very proud of 😉

It's not a bad room by any means - the puzzles are solid, there's enough content to keep a team busy, and it's definitely unique and has an interesting backstory. But it didn't leave me feeling excited or full of joy... it was almost a little too proecedural? Like we'd just sat a puzzle test.