Maldon Escape Rooms: The Cage

We played three games at Chesterfield in one day and while we found the other two incredibly fun, this one completely frustrated us and we left feeling extremely irritated.

The Cage is an immersive game with an interesting premise and you can tell they've tried to do something really unique so I will give them credit for that. I also appreciated they asked for our consent for the live actor to touch us as I would not have enjoyed that.

However in our experience, the clue system completely lets down the room by spoiling the pacing of the room and leaving you stuck for way way way too long. We hadn't done anything in the first 15 minutes of the game (!!!) because we couldn't figure out where to start, and absolutely nothing was done to help us apart from the same extremely vague and confusing clue over and over and over. No expanding on the clue to help further as most games would do. As experienced players and gamemasters ourselves, we know that if you haven't done a single thing in 15 minutes (especially in a room with such a low escape rate), you're not going to escape and so the ENTIRE experience was already ruined and we went through the rest of the room feeling completely deflated as we knew we were going to fail. We were also in handcuffs this whole 15 mins while we were desperately trying to do ANYTHING to get started so we could actually complete the room which ended up being rather painful. As the game went on, we found ourselves getting increasingly frustrated by the live actor who started to become a massive hinderance while we were already behind on time, blocking pathways we needed to get through and just generally getting in our way and purposely slowing us down further. 

Aside from this, the GM explicitly told us before the game (unprompted) that they would not be yelling at us for this game (after playing The Governor in which you are yelled at right in your face) which turned out not to be true as we were screamed at immediately as we were being taken into the room. As someone who has sensory issues, I found this to be pretty problematic and I'm still not sure why they told us that.

Overall, this was one of the worst escape room experiences I've ever had and I would not recommend this room at all.