Lock & Key Award Winners

By | April 14, 2024
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And here’s the long-awaited and much delayed (sorry!) winners of the Lock & Key Awards!

If you missed the winners of the regional awards, you can find them here.

Key Award Winners

There are two halves to the Lock & Key Awards. The Keys were open to any escape room players who wished to enter.

Key Award: Best Escape Room Anecdote

The winning entry here comes from the estimable cipherdelic:

How not to solve a puzzle….You’re locked in a prison cell and the other half of your team are in the next cell. You have the key (but no lock), and your daily ration of bread and water. So when given the challenge of transporting a key from one prison cell to another one via the cell plumbing what do you use? Something that floats right?

Apparently, using the bread roll to float the key isn’t the correct way… not only does it panic your game host into frantically pulling the plumbing system apart it also gives your team mates in the other cell a lovely squishy and tactile surprise when they put their arm in the pipe to retrieve the package.

In my defence, bread floats… it floats on the pond when you feed it to ducks… and it did work (kinda!), but it wasn’t my finest hour. LOL!

Key Award: Best Team Photo

Thank you to Laura Underwood for this touching illustration of solidarity between teammates, taken at the much missed Archimedes Inspiration!

Key Award: Fastest Escapers

And glory to Hawkeye53 a.k.a. Thunderzshock for escaping times of 24:53, 32:12 and 33:10, for an average of 30:05, the fastest set of times submitted.

Lock Award Winners

The Locks recognise excellence across the UK escape industry, based on your votes. The results for these were extremely close in almost every category, with near ties between multiple very strong candidates, but here are the winners!

Lock Award: Scariest Game

The nominees were:

  • Abducted by The Great Escape Game
  • FEAR by Project Mayhem
  • Feast by Paralysis Escape Rooms
  • Jangles Carnival by Project Mayhem
  • Nightmare by Blackout Escape Rooms
  • Phobia by Paralysis Escape Rooms
  • Séance by Enigma Rooms Wakefield
  • The Morgue Extreme by The Escape Goat
  • The Rituals of Mary by Project Mayhem
  • The Watcher by Xscream Escapes

And the winner is… FEAR by Project Mayhem!

Lock Award: Best New Company

The nominees were:

  • Case Closed
  • Donnington Manor
  • Great Yarmouth Escape Rooms
  • Rhondda Escape Rooms
  • Z-Arts

And the winner is… not possible to determine! ☹️ Many apologies to all concerned, but as it turned out the nominees were so geographically far from each other that very few people had been to more than one of these new companies.

As a result there weren’t enough comparisons between the nominees to determine a winner, and so the fairest thing to do is declare it a five-way tie.

Lock Award: Best New Escape Room

The nominees were:

  • Area 51½ by The Escaporium
  • Henry Fortune’s House of Illusion by Escape Quest
  • Mistletoe Mysteries by Escape Quest
  • The Great Loudini by Escapable
  • The Murder of Max Sinclair by Case Closed

And the winner is… The Great Loudini by Escapable!

Lock Award: Best Overall Company

The nominees were:

  • Case Closed
  • Clue Cracker
  • Co-Decode
  • EO Escape Rooms
  • Escapable
  • Escape Quest
  • Hounds Escape
  • Mindworks Escape Room
  • The Escapement
  • The Escaporium

And the winner is… Hounds Escape!

Lock Award: Best Overall Escape Room

The nominees were (deep breath):

  • Area 51½ by The Escaporium
  • Atlantis by The Escapement
  • Castaway by EO Escape Rooms
  • Daylight Robbery by Cryptology Nottingham
  • Henry Fortune’s House of Illusion by Escape Quest
  • Loot The Lanes by Pier Pressure
  • Mr Copplestone’s Curiosity Shoppe by Escape Quest
  • Percy Pendleton’s Peculiar Predicament by Escape Quest
  • Scary Tale by EO Escape Rooms
  • Séance by Enigma Rooms Wakefield
  • Temple Quest by Clue Cracker
  • The Battle For Britain by Escape Plan
  • The Explorer’s Diary by Hounds Escape
  • The Great Loudini by Escapable
  • The Karma Club by EO Escape Rooms
  • The Murder of Max Sinclair by Case Closed
  • Trapped For Cash by Mindworks Escape Room
  • UI-55 by Compendium Escape Rooms
  • Viking by Extremescape
  • Wunderwaffe Operation Quartz by The Escapement

And the winner is… The Explorer’s Diary by Hounds Escape!

And that’s a wrap – huge congrats not just to Project Mayhem, Escapable and Hounds Escape but to all the other nominees, for placing amongst the best of the best. And thank you once again to everyone who took part by voting and/or submitting an entry to the Keys!