Author Archives: escapethereview

Knockout Escape Rooms: 9-to-5 Assassin

Reading, Aug 2018

The premise for 9 To 5 Assassin is that you’re trapped in an office trying to get out before a professional killer returns. ‘Office’ is a bit of a red flag in a room description – if you have a large budget to spent on making your escape room look fa… (more)

Knockout Escape Rooms: Mad Scientist

Reading, Aug 2018

Knockout cheerfully warned us up front that they go for quite minimal backstory with their games. In this case the plot was essentially that you’re in a mad scientist’s laboratory and need to solve puzzles to escape – but delivered in a nicely light-… (more)

Houdini Escape: Escape From Titanic

Southampton, Jul 2018

‘Immersive’ is a worrying term for a game based on the sinking of the Titanic, but fortunately they don’t take things as far as plunging players into the icy waters of the Atlantic. Instead, this game places the players in an upper class berth on the… (more)

Other World Escapes: Vermilion

Southampton, Jul 2018

The second game from Other World is Vermilion, and has clearly been designed as a race game: there are two side by side copies, placed so that two teams can be briefed together then start at the same time. We played as just one team, with an unrelat… (more)

Exciting Escapes: Spies In Space

Southampton, Jul 2018

Assigning ratings to escape rooms is rarely easy, and it’s much harder when a game is ambitious and inventive in a way that gives it the potential to stand out, but then undermines that potential with the way it’s implemented – it can mean wildly dif… (more)

Elusion Escape Rooms: Seven Sins

Southampton, Jul 2018

No matter how much I firmly maintain that I don’t much like horror games, escape rooms like Seven Sins come along and demonstrate that that’s not really true. I could try to claim I liked it despite the horror theme, but that won’t wash: the t… (more)

TimeTrap Escape Rooms: The Divide

Reading, Aug 2018

There are all sorts of potential pitfalls involved in attempting to build an escape room that addresses serious social issues – in this case inequality and homelessness. Being designed as entertainment, a game could easily come across as mocking, pat… (more)

Escape Live: Casino Heist

Coventry, Jul 2018

Escape Live’s casino game is one of that rare breed of escape room where you can emerge with a variable score based not on time but quantity of winnings. There is a central thread of puzzles leading to the exit, plus a number of additional puzzles wh… (more)

Omescape: Kingdom of Cats

London, Jul 2018

Omescape is a company familiar to many US enthusiasts, and having run three games in North London for a couple of years now they’ve expanded to a second branch in Aldgate. The first game at the new branch is one I’ve seen mentioned several times in e… (more)

AIM Escape: Psychopath’s Den

London, Jul 2018

Having got out of Patient Zero in good time, we had exactly an hour plus walking time to get to our next booked game… so squeezing in another one at AIM was inevitable. Psychopath’s Den is of course a serial killer game, one of surprisingly few in … (more)