Author Archives: escapethereview

Escape Boats: SOS

Dublin, Oct 2019

Escape Boats must have had an easier time than most escape room companies when thinking up a name for their business: they have an obvious distinguishing feature, with their games set inside a boat moored in Dublin’s Grand Canal. The boat hosts two g… (more)

Escape Peterborough: The Bank Heist

Peterborough, Sep 2019

The Bank Vault is of course a heist game. It’s also designed to be a variable score game, where your success is based on how much money you get out with, not how quickly you finish. Staying past the 60 minute mark is a failure, but the gamemaster pro… (more)

Escape Peterborough: Buried Alive

Peterborough, Sep 2019

If you’ve played a few games at the Escape chain, you might feel you have a good idea of what to expect from the company. Be warned that Buried Alive is very much the exception. It’s a distinctive game built around a specific idea, and your enjoyment… (more)

Escape Peterborough: The Great Wine Cellar Swindle

Peterborough, Sep 2019

Each of the three games Escape have built in the Peterborough Museum vaults uses the space in a different way, relating to the crypt’s history: as a mortuary, as a Civil War hiding place, and most prosaically as a wine cellar. The game room in fact c… (more)

Locked In A Room: Parallax

Milton Keynes, Sep 2019

In enthusiast discussions, Locked In A Room is a company that rarely gets mentioned, and for good reason: enthusiasts are absolutely not their target audience. Their high-capacity branches with multiple copies of each game room are set up above all f… (more)

Access Ecape: Dark Magik

London, Sep 2019

Any review of Access Escape has to start with the most important fact about it: the whole game takes place in complete darkness. Enthusiasts often rail against unnecessary darkness used to make puzzles harder, but this is a completely different beast… (more)

Thinking Outside The Box: The Magician’s Apprentice

Peterborough, Jul 2019

I’ll start this review with a warning – Thinking Outside The Box are sadly due to lose their current premises in September, so if you’re reading this before then and you want to try their games (and you should), then you need to be quick. For Magicia… (more)

Hour Escape Rooms: Stranger Things

Peterborough, Jul 2019

With three seasons of the Stranger Things T.V. series now released, I’m starting to see plenty of escape rooms popping up using it as a theme, but I’m fairly sure the one at Hour Escape Rooms was the first one in the U.K. Unlicensed IP considerations… (more)

Hour Escape Rooms: Operation: Dead Planet

Peterborough, Jul 2019

Operation Dead Planet is a game I’ve been trying to play for a while; the 4 player minimum combined with Hour Escape Rooms’ location on the outskirts of Peterborough made it logistically difficult to schedule. The high minimum is due to the split sta… (more)

Plankton Games: Doctor Esker’s Notebook

Room-in-a-box, Aug 2019

I’d barely heard of Doctor Esker’s Notebook, and wasn’t even sure if it was a puzzle game or other sort of card game when the publisher sent me a copy to try. That’s always a risky thing for a publisher to do, since I’m fairly merciless about critici… (more)