Houdini’s Escape Room Experience Southampton: Escape From Alcatraz

the worst of houdini's escape rooms that we've done so far - the most glaring issue being that in the other rooms the host speaks to you via something in the story (an ai on the ship in space break, a parrot in the pirate ship for the pirate one etc.) which keeps you immersed even when engaging with the host. for this room there is no such system in place and you have to shout for the host who then physically runs into the room, completely taking away from the immersion aspect of the room.

the puzzles also felt fairly uninspired, a few really good ideas sprinkled in (which is why the rating isn't lower) but the room was predominately number/code locks which begins to be a drag after a while. the pacing of the room also feels off where you're given stuff pretty much immediately that isn't used until close to the end, 2 rooms later. while i can appreciate that there is going to be some misdirection in these rooms it's just frustrating when you've got maybe 4 numbered locks to open of varying lengths on the go at the same time and one of like 2 clues you immediately have is completely irrelevant for the next 30+ minutes.

one other issue we had was there's a moment where you've got to open something and it takes a decent amount of force as it seemed to be held shut by a magnet but the host specifies "no excessive force needed" so we assumed it was just closed and needed to be triggered to be opened for probably half of our time in the room while it was supposed to be accessible the entire time. it's a small cabinet type door and it took considerably more force than full sized doors took to open so take from that what you will.

theme was okay, but again not really up to the standard of the other rooms. this also extended to the props which just felt lacklustre once again in comparison to the others.

overall it was a disappointing room as i could see some pieces of great ideas just completely let down by the other aspects of the room, which ultimately just led to a monotonous experience. the ending was also underwhelming and didn't really feel like an ending, caught us off guard that it was over. story and plot line similarly just felt disjointed. i'd recommend against doing this room unless they address these issues, and just go ahead with one of their better rooms as the difference in quality is like night and day.

A fun room, though it has a few hidden items that we missed on searching - it seemed like these were deliberately sneaky. The puzzles were solid and pretty clear, though I think we needed a few hints.

The GM was really full on which split our team - you'll either love her or loathe her. 

We made an evening out of playing two games at Houdini's Swindon. Despite only having been open a few weeks a number of puzzles were broken or missing. Both rooms were disappointing