Grand Escape: The Lost Maya Temple

By | January 28, 2020

by Grand Escape (website)

96 Broad Street, B15 1AU

Birmingham

2-6 players

60 minutes

Player review

Review by 🌵Juliette B expert

Rated between 20 and 20 out of 5
Played: 8 Aug 2021 Team size: 2 Time taken: 59:00 Outcome: Successful escape!
beautifulillogicalbroken techquite difficult

This was one of the very few games where I have actually left feeling annoyed and contemplated leaving the room before the end. 

Good points: the set is lovely and you are immersed from the start. There are some really clever puzzles that I have not come across elsewhere. 

Bad points: having had the usual spiel at the beginning about not needing to use force or strength, this is in no way true from an early puzzle which took significant effort when we finally established it was allowed. We did discuss this with the owner at the end, whose response was "well it's obvious you couldn't break those so it's fine" ie our fault for not deducing this. It is very dark throughout (you are allowed to use your mobile phone torch). There was one puzzle that was not working unless you expelled your entire lung capacity repeatedly (again, raised this with the owner who said the tech support is overseas and he would let them know - I take his point that he doesn't want the puzzle to be too easy for large groups but you need to cater for small ones too!). Although the puzzles were clever, there was such limited signposting as to what to do with some of them it was at times obtuse without hints, and some puzzles were rather illogical even by escape room logic. Supposedly when you have done something correctly a noise will sound but often found this did not happen - I presume some elements are manually controlled as we had a few instances where either something released even though we had not finished the puzzle, or it did not when we had done it correctly (as far as we knew) but then said action happened a bit later. We did have a conversation with the owner at the end about how we had not enjoyed this room and he was receptive to feedback, but ultimately I think his priorities (that the games are padlock free and that he has bought the game in and spent money on a nice set) are not what I am looking for when it comes to enjoying an escape room. I think some adjustments in terms of puzzle sensitivity with the set design would help with some of the aforementioned issues. 

Juliette B has played 228 games - see all ratings and reviews

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