Cryptic Escape Rooms Manchester: Temple of the Forbidden Eye

The Temperamental Temple…

I took advantage of an opening offer, getting 20% off the booking.

Story

Venture into the temple and find the Forbidden Eye, a powerful treasure.

Puzzles

The game almost completely revolves around solving number locks, which came across as unimaginative given the setting. Some of them used fiddly components that were difficult to work with and/or interact with other things in the way they’re supposed to. Ambiguity also made the experience less enjoyable, especially in the final puzzle. The owner/host is new to the escape room business- he made that very clear to us- and he was far too trigger happy on the radio, giving us hints when we were still in the process of working things out on several occasions. Post-game, I asked about how it is possible to work out the sequence of numbers for one particular code once we had acquired them, to which the he said trial and error.

Mise-en-scene

The scenery contributed to a jungle temple theme, but a few aspects of decoration were tacky and it felt like light was kept to a minimum to disguise this. Windows that weren’t properly concealed took away from the sense of escapism, and the props were unsurprising.

Final Comments

In a team of two, we tackled this one fairly easily. The room is too cramped to accommodate any more than four people at a push. As a new game, the host asked our opinions of what we liked/didn’t like in order to make it better: I feel that this is something that should be done prior to opening with test teams rather than paying customers. It needs work. Since Cryptic is located in Ashton-under-Lyne, I’d need to be given a much meatier discount code to return and try the other two rooms.