Jersey Escape Tunnel: Prison Break

This room has been the source of much frustration, over a period of years! Its availability is tied to the seasonal opening of the War Tunnels, a genuine network of tunnels dug to serve as a German hospital during the occupation of Jersey during World War 2, which is now a museum. After a much-delayed opening ("coming in 2021" still said the website in 2022), Prison Break finally opened not long before the War Tunnels closed for the winter in around October 2022. Upon re-opening in spring 2023, Prison Break had to close again fairly soon after for repairs, and didn't re-open again in 2023. When the War Tunnels re-opened again in spring 2024 I was keen to give it a go, albeit a little concerned as to why it had such a troubled start. It's absolutely fantastic that the War Tunnels have embraced escape rooms, drawing on the WW2 theme, but one gets a sense that a disconnect between the War Tunnels and those who have designed/installed them may cause delays in dealing with issues.In terms of positives, an escape room in a venue like this is a strong place to start from, and walking through the tunnels on the way to the game helps set the feel. There is so much potential here. When we arrived at the game itself, it gave a good impression on entering, with a pretty decent looking interior for the theme (with a couple of anachronistic touches, but that didn't bother us too much). As the game progressed, the atmospheric sound, lighting and talking from prison guards and allies etc did a really good job of re-creating the wartime feel. A 50-minute room can sometimes be a bit of a red flag for me. Is the business trying to squeeze more customers in for the same price (see also here: the completely unrealistic 10 person maximum stated on the website - with a  fixed £22 per person charge that doesn’t change with group size - minimum 4)? Is there not enough content for a 60 minute-game? Unfortunately there wasn't an awful lot to solve in this room, but despite that we still failed, having completed about 95% of it. There were some fun moments, but it felt like most of the time went into scratching our heads over two problematic puzzles. The first of these seemed to suffer from the dreaded layered ambiguity, involving having to line some things up which did not provide clear results, and then having to input each of these possible answers into a mechanism that was capable of giving more than one result for the same input. For added measure: which of the 4-digit padlocks to put each of these attempts into? In fact we received a nudge on this which put us back on track. But what really took the fun out of this room for us was the final puzzle, which was essentially all we had left to solve with around 15 minutes left. No problem, right? The concept for this puzzle wasn't bad at all, but having worked out the correct sequence we attempted to input it over and over, slowly watching the time fade away. The problem, we eventually found out, was that we were simply starting the sequence from the wrong starting point, out by one space. We thought the written information provided seemed pretty clear, but it seems we got that wrong… In most escape rooms this would be the point where you'd receive a small nudge to say you just need to adjust your start position slightly - and save you the endless trying and failing, never really sure whether the correct answer would trigger any kind of obvious signal that you have solved it. We didn't get that help until too late, and, frustratingly, it was compounded by a few things. We had been told in the briefing that we were only allowed three hints (a practice which thankfully seems to have been mostly left behind by modern escape rooms), which we could ask for using a telephone. We weren't really sure how many of the three we'd had at this point. Some sort of positive intervention by the GM would have been handy here, given how long we spent trying the same correct pattern but starting from the wrong place. Before starting I normally ask that if it looks like we're stuck, falling behind time and look like we need a nudge, to just let us know. But here, unusually, there was no "any questions?" moment in in the briefing. I suppose maybe that's just how this particular game works, so fair enough. When we eventually got a hint on this it was all a bit too late, plus (without me trying to spell out details here) the information given in the hint seemed to reverse what we were clearly told in the written instructions about what had to be "up" and what had to be "down" (although it’s possible we misheard this). This confused us further. So the clock ticked down to zero and the GM came into the room to commiserate us on a good effort. We went through the final puzzle again with him, using the correct starting point, and then looked in the place where we had been expecting to find the final item we needed to escape (which was in a separate locked space inside a large chest) and indeed it was open. How long had it been open? Who knows. We had previously closed the chest as it heavily fell closed at one point, and seemed like a bit of a hazard (as did the way another item in the room opened at an earlier point). We played as three adults and three youngsters. Overall this felt like a room with potential that perhaps hasn't benefited from proper play testing and adjusting. Writing this kind of feels like a long-winded excuse for failing the room. For me the possibility of failing is an really important part of escape rooms. But this felt particularly disappointing to have spent such a big part of the time endlessly trying the same thing for want of a small but clear nudge. Had that come, we might have left with quite a different feeling. During the brief conversation after it seemed the issue with the final puzzle had previously been noted already, but yet to be tweaked. But I suppose that if those issues were cleared up, teams might well be getting out in 15 minutes or so. I’ve seen other rooms with a similarly small footprint manage to cram in far more game content. I would love to see the War Tunnels work with a designer with a proven track record for quality games who could really do justice to this amazing space with their next room, and put as much care into the content and flow of the game as appears to have gone into electronic gizmos (a criticism of Jersey’s previous most recent room, Space Quest, at a now closed venue). It pains a me a little to write something as negative as this, as I want to love the games in Jersey and would hate to see War Tunnels stop supporting this part of the business. I would urge those involved to explore some top venues outside of Jersey, if they haven’t already, to see how much more is possible in terms of creating a truly great experience.