Escape Kent Canterbury: The Asylum

Puzzle one in this room is to find the puzzles. Often an escape room overloads you with things to investigate right away; here you're shown into a brightly-lit, minimalist room made of white walls and nothing more, and told to get going. (Well, admittedly, you are told a bit more than that, and arguably the less you're told the better the experience would be, but you know what I mean.) It's a great and original introduction to the experience (I've played other rooms that give you little or nothing to begin with, but they're typically set in darkness with your first priority finding a way of supplying yourself with light). Of course, it doesn't take long to get a handle on what you need to be doing, and you're presented with a pleasing variety of puzzles to solve here. They're all clever, they all make good sense, and they're all satisfying to solve, rewarding observation and communication. Recommended. 

A note on the theming: this game might be called The Asylum and ostensibly themed as such, but really the theme here is about light and darkness. It's striking how the room is flooded with light from the beginning, but it also distinguishes the room's regions and plays a meaningful role in the design of at least a couple of the puzzles. I've played plenty of exquisitely themed rooms, but only in the most obvious sense that the tomb feels truly ancient, the murder house is deeply terrifying and so on. The theming here is different to that and I hope it's as intentional as I think it is because it feels thought-through and very original, but it's true that it's not explicit - it's only as I write this review that it occurs to me. Regardless, intended or not, it has a strong visual impact and I'm sure it'll be memorable in the long run. 

I can see why it was called the Asylum and how it links to an escape game, and the way that the room was presented was clever.

I do like the way that when you enter the room, you have to find the puzzles as not many rooms do that. 

The theme, though, to me, didn't fit that at all. The poster even shows a chair, someone in a jacket, and an eerie light, but the room is nothing like that.

And what I find quite disappointing is that the GM literally tells us the whole objective, what to do, and what we will see in the room - when you go in, it looks like 'this' and that we need to obain 'this' to do 'this' so you can escape.. It would have been better that we find that out in the game, maybe a message was left behind, so that it gives us the element of surprise and discovery. 

Unless I missed this, there's no character or story to tell, just you have to escape an asylum. It would have been more epic to put some of us in (loose) straitjacket for example, padlocked so that we need to get out of, just something(!) to make it worth calling it an asylum and make it more fun. Otherwise, I feel as though it should just be a futuristic space ship theme instead. Given the tech it would have made a bit more sense.

In the end, we finished the room feeling a bit disappointed that there was more that this room could offer.

This was my favourite of all the Escape Kent games as it is a minimal information room. First you need to find the puzzles before you can solve them! The puzzles are clever and tricky in places, but all are logical and there is signposting for them all... if you can find it.
I loved this room as I got to think "sideways" a lot in there and it was a great challenge, but I'm sure this will be labelled as a marmite room (you'll either love it or hate it). 

I've done this room twice and liked it. I do prefer the rooms with a theme but still enjoyed this room. 

We had scheduled this room last on our way back to the airport after an exhausting few days in Budapest and perhaps that wasn't the best idea, especially as there were only two of us to work through the whole room. It had warned it wasn't the standard escape room experience and it definitely relied more on mathematics than some of the snazzier high tech puzzles you can find in some of the other Budapest rooms. By the end of it we found ourselves tired and frustrated. A number of puzzles required outside knowledge such as the value of different Roman numerals or mathematical concepts that were not provided inside the room so if you didn't just know them you wouldn't have been able to solve the puzzles. The mechanism to open a box to get out a key was also broken so even though we had solved the puzzle the key wasn't released. The games master clearly had not been playing attention and didn't realise what had happened so kept referring us back to things we had already completed to try and help us solve the puzzle which made us more and more confused before eventually coming into the room and realising we had already found the solution but the mechanism was broken. The delay cost us about ten minutes and meant we didn't complete the room in time so that was also disappointing, though they did let us play on for an extra few minutes so we could finish. Considering the concept of the room was that everything is bright white, it was all a bit dirty and grubby. Overall the room seems quite tired and run down.