Escape Hunt Lakeside: Alice In Puzzleland

Overall, not our favourite experience - not that we’ve got many under our belt. 

Our host was great, but so many aspects of the puzzle didn’t ‘click’ with us that it felt very frustrating. We solved several puzzles before we were ‘meant’ to and, as such, nothing happened. Then when we were meant to, we didn’t try them because we assumed that we’d been incorrect. As such we wasted a lot of time because we approached things in the wrong order. 

Several of the solutions felt very ‘if you get it you get it, if you don’t you don’t’. Leaps of logic which I feel could have been signposted better. At one point, we were meant to count the number of an item but were thrown because one of those items just happened to have a number written on it (which was, according to our host, unintended and not even known - just a quick of the prop they’d sourced). 

Overall, for all that it seemed impressive and there were parts that I liked, it felt frustrating getting gatekept by puzzles that, when we did ask for a clue (once time, the clue was read at the same time as a time warning, so we couldn’t hear the clue, and then when we asked them to repeat it they more or less gave us the answer), didn’t leave us feeling like we’d been stumped by a clever clue but like we’d been tricked.