Project Escape Middlesbrough

In short, you're paying full premium price for a very "budget" escape room.

Arrived 15 mins before the game and no staff were present in the building, so we had to wait outside in the rain until a staff member came to let us in... then lights kept going off so we had to use a torch in the waiting area while waiting for him to fix the power. He was very apologetic and it was kind of funny, but not a great start considering we'd paid £30 each for this.

We were physically locked in the building AND in the room itself - not sure how this works from a fire safety point of view, so be warned.

The room itself was very low-tech and had average cookie-cutter puzzles (the type you'd find online if you search for generic escape room puzzles). The decorations were quite "budget", with parts tearing away or in need of gluing back down. There was no storyline given to us at all. It was also quite dark - luckily we brought our own torch!

In the final room, a piece of burlap parchment had frayed around the edges, meaning the original 8x8 grid was no longer visible. After asking for help, we were told to just ignore the left column (but not the top row for some reason), leading to a very illogical "solution" - this prop needs replacing ASAP.

Last tiny nit-pick: the music from the adjacent minigolf was very loud and further broke the immersion.

There's some fun to be had here, but at the £30 price point we left feeling a bit ripped off.

A low-budget yet fun room with a couple of clever puzzles (and one very illogical one involving colours).

Many different sub-rooms. Could do with some slightly better decor in some areas, and the laminated map puzzle desperately needs replacing, but given the low cost of entry, we enjoyed it.

Loved the giant Vecna statue!

Not their best room by far but we enjoyed it. Would have preferred more variety in the locks, lots of 3 and 4 digit padlocks which is a personal bug bear but there was a couple of puzzles we haven't seen before.