by Breakin' Escape Rooms (website)
89 Holloway Road, N7 8LT
3-6 players
60 minutes
Overall rating
based on ratings from 8 users
combined with 5 pro reviews
Your review
Player reviews
Pretty good standard escape room with nice Sherlock-y aesthetics. Decent range of puzzle. Only downside is the narrative doesn't feel super coherent and entire experience feels somewhat easy forgettable
#1
Really impressed with the level of detail which had gone into this game. It included a couple of things I hadn't seen before, and the room was dressed very nicely and very much in line with the theme.
Reviews by escape room review sites
The third Breakin' game I played, Sherlock's Despair is a much more traditional style of room - period furniture and padlocked drawers, four digit codes and charts of symbols.
I'd describe it as a somewhat more intellectual style of escape room, by which I don't mean that it's harder - although it's rated as the hardest of their six, correctly I think - but that it has a greater focus on numbers, with more than one maths-y moment.
That said, skill-based puzzles seem to be something of a signat...
Sherlock’s Despair was my very first escape room with Breakin’ and it was also the escape room I used to introduce a whole new team to the genre! For this reason, it has a special place in my heart.
Break-in’ Escape London- Sherlock's Despair
March 2024
Overview
With a cheeky weekend away in London planned for one of team’s birthday, we decided to try our hand at a couple of games in the nations capital. Sherlock’s Despair at Breakin’ escapes was a second and final room for the weekend after completing Heist. The reception was large and spacious, however, no where to get any refreshments and unlike the friendliness of local businesses, the hosts were very abrupt and to the point.
Room impression
The room itself wasn’t that bad, decorated as you can imagine as a typical Sherlock old style room. There were some elements in the room that didn’t make a lot of sense and seemed to have just been thrown in to fill a space. It wasn’t the worse room we’ve been in but we did expect a bit more after just completing Heist.
Puzzles
The puzzles weren’t that linear and there was enough for all 4 of us to get our teeth stuck into. There was a strong maths puzzle that even tested me and I do love maths. It turned out that we had the components of the puzzle wrong and it made the maths 100 times harder and we spent a long time on it, wrongly. Some of the other puzzles in the room, again just felt like they were thrown in and did not fit the theme of the game at all. It was a shame as some parts of the game were really good but the small parts of it seemed to let it down for us.
Game Master Clues
There is a clue system in place where you have to put a code into a telecom by the door and the code will give you a hint of where you are. Again, this seemed to be a less personal touch and distanced the host from us as a team throughout the game. We had to use it a couple if times when we came to dead end but it did what it was supposed to do but just our preference, we didn’t enjoy it.
Round Up
As mentioned in our other review of Breakin’, there is a distinct lack of customer service and the personal touch and I guess this has something to do with being in a corporate avenue in one of the most corporate cities in the world. It just wasn’t for us and we much prefer supporting local businesses and watching them grow. The room was a bit of a let down compared to Heist that we had just done. There were elements that didn’t fit with the theme and this stopped us being fully immersed in the game. Again, it’s probably worth doing if you are stuck for a room to do in London but I am sure there are better options out there. Especially for the money.