FAQ and help

Who writes the reviews?

Anyone can post ratings and reviews on the site.

The site additionally shows reviews written by bloggers and escape room reviewers. These are written for and published on their own sites – we just link to them. The idea is to make it easy to find which reviewers have written about which games.

This site is run by me (Toby). I also sometimes publish game reviews; the site links to these and factors in their ratings in the same way as reviews from other bloggers.

Why should I bother rating games here when I can use Tripadvisor / Facebook / Google / etc.?

Tripadvisor ratings for escape games are notoriously unreliable, mainly because even bad escape games tend to get a large number of 5* reviews.

This site gathers ratings from experts and enthusiasts so as to provide a much more reliable guide to which games are worth playing. By rating and reviewing games on here, you’re helping other enthusiasts find great games (and avoid terrible ones).

Additionally, the site lets you create a list of games you’ve played, and record not only a rating but also (if you want) a brief review and details such as your team size, completion time, etc.

Having created a list of games, you can view and share a map of those games; search for games excluding ones you’ve already played; and so on.

…but what about all the games I’ve played that don’t have reviews here?

You should be able to find all the U.K. games here, except for a few closed ones or small-scale pop-ups; there are also a thousand or so of the better known ones in Europe and elsewhere. However, you can still provide ratings for games that the site doesn’t know about.

Go to the rating page and choose ‘Let me type in the details manually’, then rate/review the game normally. I periodically check the site for any such games and, if I can unambiguously identify which game you’ve reviewed, will then add it to the map.

If you want to rate a lot of games, or just upload the list of games you’ve played, there’s a bulk import option for logged in users. Or for the zero-effort option, send me a spreadsheet of games via Facebook or escapethereview@outlook.com and I’ll sort it out for you.

I have a blog, can you link to my reviews too?

Sure – drop me a message by email or on Facebook and I’ll get that set up for you.

I hate Facebook Login.

So do I. (Also, that’s not a question.) The Facebook Login button here is via a standard plug-in (this one) that just creates a WordPress account for you based on your FB name, and uses FB authentication to sign you in. We don’t gain access to any non-public FB information. If you prefer not to use it though, it’s easy enough to create a WordPress account manually.

I want to create a game list but I don’t want it to be public.

There’s a privacy setting on the My Games tab. ‘Protected’ will make your list visible only to other logged in users, and ‘Private’ will hide it from everyone except you (and site admin).

I own an escape game. Can I give it a rating?

Good etiquette would be to leave it to other people to give it the praise and high ratings it undoubtedly deserves.

Why is this game showing that score / ranked in that position?

The way scores / ranks are calculated for games is a complicated mix of many different factors, not a simple average of the ratings it’s received. See How Game Scores Work for more information.

Why is this game’s rating showing in grey?

It’s an estimated rating. Again, see How Game Scores Work for more information.