A rogue policeman, Brian Miller, has been obsessed for some time with finding John Doe's killer. In his eyes the evidence points to you and your friends!
One of your group will be Taken and locked away, leaving you with two tasks: rescue your friend AND escape the room. Although you are separated, the entire group will be able to work together to complete the challenge.
Officer Miller has been very clever in the way he has hidden clues around his somewhat dilapidated room with some impressive gadgets used along the way.
You will need to do some searching within the room as well as solving puzzles if you want to make your escape.
This room is no normal room – let’s just say it's lacking in some of the comforts of our other rooms - but it's just as much fun!
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Having played over 50 rooms, and compared to some of the others at this venue, as a whole this room was incredibly underwhelming. The theming wasn’t great, and the puzzles were often a bit illogical. We spent 10 minutes scouring the room for the code to unlock the first padlock - in the end we had to be given a hint, with the solution making us both a bit irritable as it was sloppy in its design. Some of the other puzzles were fine, but halfway through we came across another that didn’t make sense as it involved ambiguous symbol matching.
Perhaps we’re just fussier than we used to be as we’ve done some truly outstanding rooms, both in theming and with the puzzles involved, but we left the room feeling a bit irritated, and it was one of those we complained about the whole way home.
Team size: 2Time taken: 61Outcome: Successful escape!
great hostingillogicalplainvery difficult
First of all, need to say that escape sheffield other 3 rooms are far superior to this one, and every time we have been the hosts have been absolutely amazing and this time was no exception to that.The theme is taken, a serial killer/kidnapping escape room…. Set in a building managers office???? The room looks like an office and is very plain and uninspired, so if you enjoy heavily themed experiences then this isn’t the room for you.Next the reason why this room is so difficult is that NOTHING is signposted, we found an initial hint that led to a dead end and this was the experience throughout, just frustration after frustration around every turn. Some necessary items were so hidden that even after being told to look for them it still took a lot of searching to find them. This frustration is compounded by no sense of direction or continuity throughout the room.Moving onto one of the biggest problems, one massive time wasting “puzzle” that requires no thinking/puzzling whatsoever. Our other major complaint was that some puzzles have no way of telling the direction for the order, (I.e. left to right or right to left?), especially when dealing with long directional padlocks this was extremely unnecessary. I checked with our host afterwards and they confirmed there was no way to tell the correct direction of the sequence, you just had to try both.Overall it was disappointing given how much we enjoyed the other rooms here, if they’re contemplating replacing a room in future then it 100% should be this one.
I really enjoyed this room, there was one puzzle that took us ages but we were laughing so hard that keeping getting it wrong just made us laugh harder. Really good fun!
Played: 14 Oct 2023Team size: 2Time taken: 34:34Outcome: Successful escape!
plainunoriginalvery easy
Like Taken Candy
From a Baby
Since I was
making an on-the-day booking for a team of 2, I chose Taken.
Story
Rescue your
kidnapped friend(s) and escape the hostage situation.
Puzzles
On-theme, but
incredibly easy. A bit of searching here, a bit of thinking there.
Mise en scene
A straightforward
but immersive enough space that did the job of looking like a kidnappers’ hideout.
Final Comments
It would work
fine as a beginner room. I should have been braver and booked us a 4/5-star
challenge: we received 2 clues and escaped with 25:26 left on the clock.
The second game at Escape Ipswich (and also at various other branches of Escape around the country) has you investigating a serial killer, and inevitably you've found yourselves caught and in danger of becoming his next victims. Naturally this killer enjoys toying with his prisoners in the form of leaving them puzzles that they might be able to solve to escape.
Like the other game we played at the venue, there's not a great deal in the way of decor here. Forget dank basements, this serial kille...
Plenty of puzzles, a fair number of locks and good but very much IKEA-esque decoration. A perfectly reasonable game but with nothing to get very excited about.
One of their first rooms, which shows, could do with a revamp as it’s not up to the same standard as their other games. Click the link to read our review!
