by Cryptology Nottingham (website)
107 Upper Parliament Street
3-6 players
60 minutes
Overall rating
based on ratings from 22 users
combined with 4 pro reviews
Your review
Player reviews
Great idea, keeps you very busy. Just doable as a 2 although you need to be on your A game. Definitely recommend.
Great game host gave us a clear briefing for a complex setup. This is five rooms in one, each with a different style. Lots of stuff to do so you never get bored or stuck watching somebody else, with a huge variety of puzzles so there’s something for everyone. Plenty of touches of humour too. A few places were a bit cramped, especially with five players.
This was our second visit to Cryptology and it's great that the staff dress up, we didn't really notice for our first game. The briefing took a long while, but it's because your are doing 5 escape rooms not one. This would have been the full 5*s if we got chance to complete every puzzle, but this was mentioned in the breifing that the game has been made like this. This is one for the expert, so different and lots and lots of fun!
Reviews by escape room review sites
This isn’t a typical, search every corner for items type of room. This is solve as many puzzles as you can in the time and get rewarded for those that you do solve type of challenge. This means that even if you don’t do so well at the beginning, you still have a chance to progress to the end and “escape”!
Think of it as a Crystal Maze episode where you are all allowed to take on all the challenges in all four zones one after the other, where they open all the doors in each zone and the whole team just goes and works on all the puzzles simultaneously, obtains crystals (dreamkeys) for solving those puzzles, and then moves on to the next zone. The final zone (dream) is made easier the more puzzles you have solved, but you all get a chance to tackle it not matter how well you did.
It is worth spending about 12 minutes in each room, to maximize your chances, but you can move on if you do manage to get all 5 keys from that room earlier than that.
We collected 18 of the 20 keys and escaped in time, getting the second fastest time of any 3 person team to take on the Dreamscape!
Puzzle fans will love this one. It really is like a test of your puzzling skills as a team, and for everyone’s individual strengths. We had a Math whizz in our team who solved the number based puzzles in record time. Similarly I whizzed through the wordy ones, and together we did the logic and physical challenges.
Highly recommended for something a bit different, an immersive experience with a lot of laughs and clearly a room where the owners have thought outside the box and put a lot of time and effort into make something fantastical, varied and humorous that will have broad appeal. And they did just that!
The rooms were incredible – Dreamscape plays out like an escape room fan’s actual dream, with a huge volume of puzzles, all focussing on different strengths, and a great flow between each of the dreams! Each dream was so different from the previous and the types of puzzles in each room were SO cleverly tied into the feel of the dream you find yourself in. We spent most of the game working separately to try and tackle the volume of puzzles we were faced with – but we did come together a few times for some particularly tricky bits! We tried to separate according to our strengths (but in hindsight it was probably whoever got to the puzzle first! ).
Lists
- Best UK escape rooms 2021 by Escape the Review expert
These are the 100 highest rated escape rooms (out of 1600) in the UK, as of 31st Dec 2021, based on combined ratings from enthusiasts, bloggers and experts - every game here comes highly recommended.