Escape Southend: Carnival of Curiosities

We felt a lack of logic and flow in this game. There was a cool looking prop which we wasted a lot of time on and turned out to be a red herring. There were a few tech faults, a few poorly designed puzzles for items not fixed down, which should have been as they needed to be where they were to get a code but by the time we realised that we had already moved them. Could be easily avoided (as it was already fairly high up) just by simply fixing them to where they needed to be. 

A heavy reliance on battery powered sound effects and a couple of obvious codes which we managed to use out of sequence which confused the game. 

My experience here wasn’t great. The host was reading the brief from a laminate sheet and had to stop half way through to attend to a hint request in another room so they were running more than one game at a time. No personality. No engagement for the customers that were RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM. Also booking people into the Lazer Quest at the same time… 

If the room was phenomenal then the pre game would have been forgiven. But it wasn’t. The room looks tired. Lots of broken props. At one point some coloured balls drop and I’ve never seen anything so filthy in an escape room. It needs a good clean! 

One puzzle didn’t make any sense whatsoever so I ended up guessing the combination based on what we knew WAS right. When asked to explain the puzzle after the room , the game master didn’t actually know how to solve it and they “just know what to solution is”. Not a great experience by any stretch. 

This game has been closed for a while so it seems so  it get improved… who knows? 

As someone scared of clowns, I thought this was going to be amazingly petrifying. It really wasn’t, broken tech and broken props with limited scares. Could be better

Very simple room, could be brilliant but too many broken elements. Part of the room looked fun but didn't work, kept saying I know what to do but it's not working to be told there's a pole, use that instead. I have to admit this was a long time ago and may have been updated. I have only just joined escapethe review