Category Archives: UK

TimeQuest: Elf Magic 2: The Santa Clause

Tonbridge, Nov 2021

I’ll admit to being a natural Grinch on whom the joys of Christmas spirit are largely wasted, and so I normally only play one or two festive games each year; TimeQuest’s was my only such physical room for the 2021 season, so I was glad to find it was… (more)

Swamp Motel: The Drop

London, Nov 2021

Swamp Motel will be familiar to many enthusiasts from their Isklander trilogy of online games released during lockdowns, starting with Plymouth Point; they’ve now moved from the internet to the real world, and The Drop is a physical escape room / imm… (more)

SENSAS

London, Sep 2021

SENSAS is not an escape room. As an experience it’s closer to the style of the live Crystal Maze, in that it involves a series of challenges for you to tackle as a team, collecting tokens for your successes as you go. Unlike the Crystal Maze, in SENS… (more)

Time Run Presents: Sherlock: The Game Is Now

London, Feb 2020

In the early years, as escape rooms spread throughout the U.K., one London venue quickly gained an international reputation for production values that were streets ahead of anywhere else, as well as a variety of then unheard of innovations such as a … (more)

Escape Reading: Ram Raid

Reading, Feb 2020

Many venues invest greater amounts of money and tech in each new game they create. I think that’s true of Escape Reading too, but they’ve also shown something rarer and more important: an ever-improving ability to make their games engaging, logical a… (more)

TimeTrap Escape Rooms: Station X

Reading, Feb 2020

Time Trap’s wartime game is based around Bletchley counter-espionage. Set in a railway station, it gives you the job of identifying which of seven suspects is a spy. You have an additional bonus mission – apparently the spy has hidden several cylinde… (more)

TimeTrap Escape Rooms: Pudding Lane

Reading, Feb 2020

Those who are less familiar with London history might assume Pudding Lane is confectionary themed – but of course this game is actually named after the place where the Great Fire of London began in 1666. Your team has been sent back in time, not to p… (more)

Knockout Escape Rooms: Curious Cabin

Reading, Jan 2020

Cabins in escape rooms have a tendency to turn grizzly – the ominous cabin in the woods trope. This one is an exception. It turns out to be a fairly normal miner’s cabin (normal other than being filled with puzzles, I guess); unfortunately, just at t… (more)

History Mystery: Secrets of the Tunnels

Norwich, Dec 2019

Most of the reviews I’ve written of games by History Mystery could start in a similar way, by saying: “this is the first game I’ve played inside…”. With Secrets of the Tunnels, that sentence ends with “…an underground medieval street”. This is a … (more)

Escapologic: Robin of Lockskey

Nottingham, Nov 2019

I narrowly missed out on the chance to play Lockskey the first time round, when it briefly opened and then closed again due to problems with the underground location (since when it’s been completely revamped, so I believe is safe to play even if you … (more)