Chesterfield Escape Rooms

Well this was an absolute festive delight! Plenty to do in this interactive, family-friendly room that encompasses lots of the classic Christmas tropes and a little bit of acting. It's a feel-good room that would be lovely for the whole family but that provides enough business for enthusiasts who fancy a jolly festive time.

It's a fun game that is interactive and suitable for children. A nice space with some good decor and the odd fun quirk. 

A classic room game fearuring a combination of search, deduction and translation(!) puzzles.  Play is mostly linear with a couple of surprises in later rooms that are executed well and should bring a smile to your face.

This game is quite child friendly with some fun theming.  The beach theming is minimal but effective, this is a relatively straight forward room but there’s still a couple of puzzles that could trip you up.

Taking over the space from “The Cage”, this is a large multi room game which features a split start told with a novel tale.  Story is good and theming and set pieces carry this off effectively.  Once the game starts there is a lot to do, and the game changes gear from linear to non-linear and back again and there a couple of points where it’s easy to get bogged down.  Theming is good and the puzzles are relatively standard but some are very obtuse, I think signposting needs some work to improve the overall flow of the game.  This is billed as their hardest game but I think some observation puzzles are unfair.

A classic escape room with a lot of familiar tropes.  This game is very padlock heavy and the puzzles are a combination of searching and logical deduction.  Theming is ok and is enough to convey the ideas and story behind the room.  Our host was Brad who clued us when we needed to and ran the game incredibly well.  

This has the potential to be quite a good room. However, there are elements to the room that can make it feel a little awkward at times. The sign posting needs to be improved; but the concept and set design was rather impressive.

This room was quite different and very theme-driven. There were some cool touches, quite a lot of puzzles to get through, and a weird amount of rhyming. 

This is a fun room with some great hosting (our host committed to it!) - I think we managed to stress ourselves out quite a lot and our puzzle solving suffered 😅 it’s worth just getting into the theme and having fun with this one! 

The game just didn't seem to flow. It felt we were just walking around the room trying to figure out what to do with the little information we had. Dare not ask for a clue as you're only allowed 3. When we did ask it wasn't really any sort of decent info. It could've just been us off form today though 

While this isn't the biggest room in terms of floor plan, it's a great game with lots of lovely padlocks and some clever puzzles in a really delightful space.

A thoroughly decent game with some lovely bits of interaction and decent content. Decor is excellent and hosting is, as always at Chesterfield, very pleasant indeed.

What a blast! This was a fun, interactive spin on the bank heist trope, sandwiched with a cracking beginning and end. There's a degree of acting involved but nothing too tricky and nothing that takes away from the impetus of the game. This is an incredibly immersive game and we found ourselves really getting into role. Top marks for enjoyment!

I was really scared throughout this! Loved the attention to detail, but it seemed to go on forever. Our games host was great! One of the puzzles I found a litttle inaccessible but our GH worked around it. Just escaped! 

We played three games at Chesterfield in one day and while we found the other two incredibly fun, this one completely frustrated us and we left feeling extremely irritated.

The Cage is an immersive game with an interesting premise and you can tell they've tried to do something really unique so I will give them credit for that. I also appreciated they asked for our consent for the live actor to touch us as I would not have enjoyed that.

However in our experience, the clue system completely lets down the room by spoiling the pacing of the room and leaving you stuck for way way way too long. We hadn't done anything in the first 15 minutes of the game (!!!) because we couldn't figure out where to start, and absolutely nothing was done to help us apart from the same extremely vague and confusing clue over and over and over. No expanding on the clue to help further as most games would do. As experienced players and gamemasters ourselves, we know that if you haven't done a single thing in 15 minutes (especially in a room with such a low escape rate), you're not going to escape and so the ENTIRE experience was already ruined and we went through the rest of the room feeling completely deflated as we knew we were going to fail. We were also in handcuffs this whole 15 mins while we were desperately trying to do ANYTHING to get started so we could actually complete the room which ended up being rather painful. As the game went on, we found ourselves getting increasingly frustrated by the live actor who started to become a massive hinderance while we were already behind on time, blocking pathways we needed to get through and just generally getting in our way and purposely slowing us down further. 

Aside from this, the GM explicitly told us before the game (unprompted) that they would not be yelling at us for this game (after playing The Governor in which you are yelled at right in your face) which turned out not to be true as we were screamed at immediately as we were being taken into the room. As someone who has sensory issues, I found this to be pretty problematic and I'm still not sure why they told us that.

Overall, this was one of the worst escape room experiences I've ever had and I would not recommend this room at all.

This room was buckets and buckets of fun! Of all the games we had booked in for at Chesterfield, this one was the one we were most nervous for after reading some of the other reviews on here that mentioned the gameplay being a lot more acting than solving puzzles. However, we had an absolute blast in this room. We laughed pretty much the entire hour and the acting segments added to the whole experience rather than detracting from it. We could tell that with some of the acting parts, the GM was trying to slow us down as clearly we were doing rather well for time (the puzzles themselves were relatively easy), but as we were having so much fun and still escaped with a respectable time, we didn't really mind! Super cool beginning to the room and a thrilling end, with a bunch of fun puzzles and exciting moments in the middle. We have done a few 'robbery' rooms before with heists being quite a common room theme, but this one was by far the most impressive, unique and enjoyable.

We felt that some puzzles didn't really fit the theme super well (or at all) and there were a few things in one of the areas that felt like unnecessary red herrings - one thing in particular absolutely seemed like it was part of the game (any experienced player would assume it was) and one of the clues even related to it which was extremely misleading/confusing. Lights weren't switched on in one part of the game (found out afterwards from the GM that they were supposed to be) so we were in complete darkness which obviously made the game more difficult and somewhat dangerous due to the flooring in this area. Whiteboard pen also wasn't working, GM came into the room and gave us 6 more, none of which worked either which was fairly frustrating and made us lose time. 

Aside from this, The Governor was a good, immersive room and it's a shame there were just a few little issues that added up to detract from the experience.

Much of the Governor was reviewed at another Franchise in Chelmsford by Toby (which you can find elsewhere on this site).

On the plus side then was a strong theme (Prison break/haunted/psycho combination), with a nice variety of puzzles (albeit that at times it felt a little bit disjointed). There was a nice series of spaces that took you on a journey through the Prison.

There are however a number of flaws in the game, which detracted from our experience, and many of which could be reasonably easily addressed to improve the experience. There were some puzzles where you needed to search a dimly lit room with one UV torch to know where to start – never a fun experience. Another puzzle had accessibility issues, where we knew exactly what the puzzle was asking to do, and came to a solution, but couldn’t work out what needed changing due to poor lighting. Whilst the venue has a habit of leaving redundant information as deliberate red herrings, there was a feature in one of the spaces which I was genuinely astonished was not labelled “not part of the game”. 

For larger groups, redundant information is unlikely to be as big an issue, since by dividing and conquering these can be relatively quickly eliminated. For smaller groups, it can be frustrating, particularly in a game with so many padlocks.

Of note is that whilst we failed this room as a pair, apparently no group of 2 had succeeded at the room (at least at that venue) beforehand, and the pass rate was averaging around 10% for a larger group. We failed to reach a certain part of the game, and yet apparently had done “incredibly well” for a group of 2, which felt rather jarring.

This is a game that with minor modifications could be brought up to a much closer level to their “Rob the bank” game.

Not suitable for young families, and those who scare easily should request adjustments from the Game Manager first.

You’ve promised The Crazy Cat Lady you’ll look after her cats while she is away.  In one hour she’ll be home and all six cats have been mischievous and are missing.  You have one hour to find the cats and get out of her house before she returns.

So first thing – theming on this room is excellent. It’s entirely cat obsessed, as one would expect from the title. There are a myriad of little touches that add to an experience of complete cat overwhelm. It’s very family friendly, with just one “jump scare” (more of a surprise, not horror).

This room does have a nice variety of on theme puzzles that blended with the theme, but was still relatively reliant on coded padlocks in a way that didn’t quite let everything flow. Some people may have accessibility issues with some of their puzzles.

One point to note is that Chesterfield Escape Rooms have a philosophy of including quite a lot of redundant information that plausibly could provide a solution to the clues. Ostensibly this is done to create authenticity. For larger groups, this is unlikely to be a major issue, since by dividing and conquering these can be relatively quickly eliminated. For smaller groups, it can be frustrating!

Overall a good room that should appeal to almost any group of players (although more than 4 would likely be too crowded).

You are a group of bank robbers breaking into a bank that’s owned by a rival criminal gang (so no hard feelings).

There were a lot of strong points to this game. The décor was of good quality, with some nice touches, particularly near the start of the room. The puzzle mechanisms were also kept strongly on theme; some of Chesterfield Escape Rooms’ other games tend to be very padlock heavy, but here much more thought has gone into the mechanisms, and any padlocks fitted within context.

One point to note is that Chesterfield Escape Rooms have a philosophy of including quite a lot of redundant information that plausibly could provide a solution to the clues. Ostensibly this is done to create authenticity. For larger groups, this is unlikely to be a major issue, since by dividing and conquering these can be relatively quickly eliminated. For smaller groups, it can be frustrating!

The thing however that makes this game the most fun is that after a fairly standard start, it becomes very playful. There are a number of interactive elements with the “outside world” which are highly silly and entertaining, and a certain amount of (non-scary) live action complete with some well known theme music which made us laugh. There’s also a nice “extra win” condition that adds a different form of enjoyment. Good for most groups other than very young children.

What a fun room! The puzzles were surprisingly challenging and there are quite a lot of them but it was something that felt a bit different to the usual. We're cat people so naturally loved the theme and we tore through this room as a two (and it would be a bit cramped with a bigger team).