by Escape Reality Glasgow (website)
Merchant Square, Basement Unit 1, G1 1LE
2-6 players
Languages: EN
60 minutes
Overall rating
based on ratings from 58 users
combined with 4 pro reviews
Your review
Player reviews
Our first ever escape room! Host was friendly and kept us calm considering we had no idea what to expect.
Locked in separate cells, so forced to communicate using voice only, "We Were Here" style!
Puzzles were varied and interesting, though nothing particularly stood out. Theming and decor were excellent.
One early padlock wouldn't open despite us inputting the correct combination - turns out it was just a bit tight and needed a tough pull, but this cost us nearly 15 minutes!
The hints system was via an iPad where you had to "scan" things with a camera, and had a 10-minute cooldown. Not ideal, given how vague some of the hints were.
Shame this place has shut down, would've recommended it to friends.
On the website it advised teams of 3-4 so did not book this originally. Asked while playing our 2 rooms on the day and after seeing us play said we could do it quite well as a team of 2. As they were quiet they offered a free game to try this out. Just a generic prison break room which we actually found quite easy for a team for two and easily escaped in time. Little disappointed as expected a little bit more.
This was my first ever escape room and it was amazing - being separated at the start immediately makes you work as a team. There were some easy parts and some much more difficult parts. We made the rookie mistake of letting a door behind us lock, other than that we didn't need any help from GMs. Would 100% recommend!
Overused theme with cheap props and unusable tablet hint system. No GM interaction apart from actually having to come into the room to do something. Easy puzzles bar one incredibly frustrating supposedly obvious action. Do not recommend.
Reviews by escape room review sites
Alcatraz is a padlock-heavy, very linear game with a tendency towards fairly numeric puzzles. A good first impression was somewhat let down by some weaknesses of the game.
First of these was a puzzle where the clue for the answer was ambiguous, giving two possible answers only one of which would work. That's a design weakness, and was entirely avoidable here. It was compounded by the context, which involved a communication element that made the ambiguity harder to detect. (While discussing the ...
Alcatraz is a well-produced room with good puzzle diversity. The overall experience is ultimately let down by the sub-par hint system, but the room itself is good quality. I’d recommend this room for larger teams that have a few escape room victories under their belt – you’ll need every brain in the room!
Time penalties were given for each clue given which is the only downside for Escape Reality, however, we escaped within the 60 minutes we were given, so I'm taking it as a win.
A good looking room, with good puzzles, this was the last of 4 for us, I thoroughly enjoyed it, we could have, and probably should have made it easier for ourselves, but despite that we got through. The iPad with time penalties for clues is probably the only downside for me.
See also
- Escape Reality Cardiff: Alcatraz (Cardiff) (closed)
- Escape Reality Coventry: Alcatraz (Coventry) (closed)
- Escape Reality Edinburgh: Alcatraz (Edinburgh)
- Escape Reality Leeds: Alcatraz (Leeds) (closed)
- Escape Reality Leicester: Alcatraz (Leicester) (closed)
- Escape Reality Manchester: Alcatraz (Manchester) (closed)
- Escape Reality Birmingham: Alcatraz (Birmingham) (closed)
- Escape Reality Preston: Alcatraz (Preston) (closed)
- Escape Reality Newcastle: Alcatraz (Newcastle)
- Break Free Leeds: Alcatraz Island (Leeds)
- Break Free Preston: Alcatraz (Preston)