Southampton, May 2017
Change the Record is a fun, brightly coloured game set in a believable (if modest) record store. If you’re like me, the fantastic 80s pop soundtrack and puzzles featuring popular tracks from the 80s will trigger a nostalgic glee that carries you through the game – so relax, and walk this way…
The puzzles were well designed, and fit together neatly. The room isn’t extremely search heavy but there are certainly quite a few things to find and identify – so assemble a team of both searchers and puzzlers to beat it before the final countdown. It’s a kind of magic when you find yourself under pressure you just can’t get enough, even though you still haven’t found what you’re looking for.
I’d recommend this game as a great introduction to escape rooms – as it is so well laid out. The furnishings and props are well chosen for their authenticity which does boost the feeling of immersion.
We enjoyed each of the games we played at Exciting Escapes – the company has done well to so successfully imagine clear and different period rooms, with an excellent variety of puzzles in each. Nothing in the rooms felt lazy or hurried – and this suggests that the rooms were well playtested.
Should I stay or should I go? You should go!
Recommended – fun, with a good dollop of nostalgia on the side. 
If a record shop sounds like an odd setting for an escape game, never fear: according to the game premise, the proprietor is a secret agent from the far side of the Iron Curtain, and your job is to ferret out and thwart his nefarious plans.
Something unusual about Exciting Escapes as a venue was that, although all my team liked all three of their rooms, we were very split on which we liked best. Each is designed around a particular decade, and has a different feel to it: the 50s game had a subtle but effective melancholic atmosphere, the 70s game was more physical and fun, and as their 80s game, Change The Record revels in happy nostalgia.
Rather than needing to escape the room, the exit condition is to successfully gather the key information you’ve been tasked with finding. In the absence of an exit door key or an obvious macguffin that screams ‘you’ve won the game’, we were briefly uncertain whether we’d finished or not. Although it made the very end of the game less of a climax, I quite liked the novelty and realism of searching for information instead of an object or a way out.
My impression was that the puzzles here were a little more standard escape room fare than in the other two rooms, albeit all very themed and with lots of good use of objects that fit the record store setting. On the other hand, although the other two games appealed to me more, this was the favourite for two of my teammates. It did leave Karma Chameleon going round my head for the rest of the day, though. 
