Escape the Review

This is the third game I’ve played at Cryptic, and the third one that’s left me with mixed feelings - much that’s impressive, but also several things that leave me not entirely sold on the room.

This is a robbery game, in which you have to break into a vault owned by a mafia boss, with the unusual twist that you won’t be stealing cash, you’ll be making digital transfers once you reach the control panel from which to do so.

Another unusual twist in this room is that it uses augmented reality. ...

Escape Quest’s unusual model presents a challenge for enthusiasts who want to check off all their rooms - since only one is available at a time, the only way to do so is with multiple pilgrimages to Macclesfield, one every few months. We missed out on their newest game when it was running this spring, but finally managed to catch Percy Pendleton as it came round again in the rotation.

This one is set in 1912, and you’re tasked with finding a missing person. As is standard at Escape Quest, the m...

I had a great time in all four of the rooms at Beverly Breakout, but one game was a clear stand-out: this one. The Goblins of Toadsmead is a magic school / wizarding world type of story in which you’re trying to prevent magic from fading from the world, and combines enough tributes to the Potter-verse to keep fans happy while also doing its own thing.

This is a game with distinct stages, each with its own style of decor and each putting you in a different part of the story world; each stage was...

This is a game with two names - you may see it referred to as either Room 118 or Operation Hideout. I believe the former name is used when you’re playing the 60 minute version, and the latter when you’re playing the 100 minute version. It’s broadly the same game either way; the shorter version just has some of the content left out. We played the longer version of course, and barring unusual circumstances I’d expect pretty much anyone who likes escape rooms enough to be reading this site to want ...

Second in our binge of Beverley Breakout rooms was The Great Toy Rescue. With a premise and decor that might be inspired by Toy Story, you’re in a playroom of toys trying to rescue one specific toy. This is an entirely wholesome theme, and the captor you’re rescuing the toy from is almost as cute as the one you’re saving.

The briefing doesn’t tell you exactly who you’re rescuing. Part of the mission is to work out which toy to save - something that we’re entirely lost track of mid-game a...

Every December there’s an explosion of temporary Christmas games. Some remain open for some months afterwards, and a handful of them are available all year round - including Santa Paws, which naturally we played on a sunny day in July.

I’d describe this room as being relatively simply decorated, but it’s clear it’s a permanent installation put together with care, not something thrown together quickly for Christmas. As with the other rooms at this venue there’s no shortage of padlocks, but used ...

FEAR has a reputation, having won the players’ choice vote for scariest escape room in the UK. You could characterise Project Mayhem’s three games as ‘fun and fear’ (Jangles), ‘puzzles and fear’ (Mary), and ‘fear and fear’ (FEAR). Which isn’t to overhype the scare factor of the game; rather, the point of the room is to be a fear experience, not puzzle solving.

The story has you trapped inside a serial killer’s house, and you need to not only escape but also collect four pieces of evidence along...

Our second game at Project Mayhem was accurately described as their most traditional escape room experience, in the sense of having the most puzzles. Even so, it’s definitely more a horror experience than a puzzle room.

The premise is a horror classic, involving a dead child and some demonic possession. It also uses an abandoned hospital style setting, making great use of hospital curtains to reduce your visibility of your surroundings. The decor style is creepy, dingy decay; the steps we tende...

Scary games are dark; it’s true of pretty much every horror game I’ve played or heard of. It’s a straightforward, natural way to build atmosphere and fear - but Jangles’ Carnival is an exception, being brightly lit pretty much the whole way through.

This is of course a game about clowns, and you may not be alone in there. It’s also a game set in a funfair, and it’s full of suitable games and challenges. This includes some more traditional escape room puzzles, but Jangles is not focused on puzzl...

In contrast to the venue’s other two games, The Comms Room takes place in a single small room - but don’t let that put you off. This is a compact, high energy game that puts you in charge of defending Canterbury from a WWII air raid, and is my favourite of the venue’s offerings.

The location has the advantage of both atmosphere and historical accuracy - the very room where the game is set was apparently used as a comms room during the war. It’s a cool space in any case, further enhanced with li...

I have good memories of Deliverance from my previous trip to Lincoln some years earlier, and was curious to see how well a return visit lived up to those, particularly since Martha is currently the highest rated of their four rooms. The majority of their games have themes that are at least somewhat scary, and this one is a classic paranormal premise, with a sealed attic hiding a dark history.

You’re cast as paranormal investigators, and at the game start you’re given the kit to match - a whole ...

Our second game at Escape Rooms Suffolk was The Jungle, at time of writing their latest. The premise here is that you’ve crash-landed, and have an hour in which to transmit your position to a rescue helicopter before it runs short of fuel and decides to abandon you.

There’s a secondary goal here though. Contacting the helicopter is the official win condition for the game, but as a bonus objective you can also attempt to retrieve treasure from the jungle ruins.

Our hosts described this as a mor...

This game is not located within the building signposted Escape Rooms Suffolk - you’ll need to follow the signs to The Church down the path alongside. The location clearly gives them the luxury of space, and even so there’s a TARDIS effect where the game space appears to be larger when you’re in it than seems possible from the exterior.

We were exploring a graveyard, with a spooky locked church adjacent. It was immediately impressive both for the scale of the room and also for how well-built it ...

When we visited, Karma Club had been closed for a few months following some problems with the wiring; we played as a test group for its re-opening, freshly restored with a couple of new puzzles. But it didn’t feel like a test play, it felt like a polished and settled-in game.

Your mission is to break into the nightclub owned by the shady music producer who (boo, hiss!) stole your hit single and claimed it as his own. Specifically, you’re trying to steal a golden disk, and - to really rub it in ...

The name of this room should make clear that it’s based on the darker sort of fairy tale, where witches lock up children, where Red Riding Hood might not be saved from the wolf, and where happy endings are not guaranteed… but Scary Tale does not in fact set out to be all that scary. It’s dimly lit and perhaps creepy in places, but unless you’re particularly nervous, at most it might make you jump once or twice.

As ever, EO makes sure all players have a decent torch, so the darkness wasn’t parti...

There are far fewer Easter games than there are Christmas ones, and even fewer that are available year-round. EO’s Eggscape is emphatically not a quick pop-up intended to take advantage of the season - it comfortably stands alongside the other rooms at the venue.

In fact, in the first section you might forget about the Easter theming - it begins with a split team start that goes on for longer than typical. As split team sections go, I thought it was a particularly well-designed one too, with pl...

I was impressed by how consistent the quality was at EO, across different styles of game. Each of the six we played had its own charms and highlights, and I can imagine each of them being the favourite for different teams. Scarlet wasn’t my favourite of the six, but it was still a lovely room with its own distinctive and memorable touches, and would be the standout room at most other venues.

It’s a sweet premise: you need to rescue Scarlet the sacred parrot from poachers, and restore the missin...

Our second room at EO Escapes also had a memorable great opening, in a completely different way to Castaway. This one is a fairy tale type of setting, though one with quite a dark feel to it, where a princess has been cursed by a witch and you need to find a way to break the spell. Note that it requires a bit more physical mobility than the other games at the venue; if in doubt best discuss with them beforehand.

The game area is dimly lit, but we were all provided with good quality torches. Thi...

Some themes are easier to create than others; an outdoor setting is much more of a challenge to build convincingly than, say, an office. A desert island is particularly difficult - but Castaway absolutely smashes it. This room delighted me from the moment I walked in with its whimsical and clever way of setting the scene; it had us all in a great mood from the very start of the game.

The setup is simple: your boat has left you stranded in an unfamiliar shore, from which you need to escape. This...

After two months playing escape rooms in places where the industry is not so developed, walking into the start of this game was a true pleasure - and I suspect it’ll have a similar effect on all but the most jaded. This Alice in Wonderland adaptation is creative with its opening and lavish with its use of space. I’ve played entire escape rooms that were smaller and much less decorated than the section that this game uses purely to set the scene.

It was also refreshing to play a room that claime...

I looked at the name of this game and assumed it was a story inspired by the Matrix… but no, as we discovered on arrival, the premise is actually that there’s a missing child named Neo, and you’re investigating his bedroom to try to solve the mystery.

Honestly, if I were a child living in a bedroom as drab and run-down as this, I’d have run away from home. This is an escape room that’s suffered from the passage of many teams before us, with damage to decor and puzzle items, including a couple o...

There were several rooms available at Quest Project Isolation; we ruled out the horror games then chose Wednesday because it seemed to be their newest, and was listed as their most challenging. The theme is the Addams Family, following the recent movie, as our host explained expecting us to have seen it; but it wasn’t a problem that we hadn’t. In practice I saw little sign of narrative in the game beyond the broad theming.

Led into the room blindfolded, I found I wasn’t immediately sure where w...

Tbilisi used to have more escape companies, but the pandemic took a toll, and at time of writing I believe there are only two available. TTE Rooms is the closer one to the centre, and has just the one room, the name of which I only discovered after we’d completed it. If you’re trying to find this venue, be warned that there seem to be three building entrances with the same number on that street, and you’ll want the third one.

The story is that you’re attempting to steal some gold from a house, ...

This was the latest in a series of rooms I tried at random in countries not normally known for escape rooms. Baku does have several companies, but Portal Games is comfortably the largest, with around a dozen different locations, and over thirty games, most listed as available in three languages - though the majority of those are horror themes, and I was doubtful how many actual puzzles those contained.

Magic Lamp was clearly a non-horror theme, though as it turned out it did have an actor. Sinc...

Most of Almaty’s escape venues appeared to be either horror houses or no longer operating. Quest Zone was the only exception I managed to find, and they even seemed to be happy to run a game in English. For once, the room was more than theoretically playable in English - our host spoke decent English and all written elements in the game had been translated.

The story was that we’d been trapped by a mad scientist who planned to turn us into cockroaches if we couldn’t solve his puzzles. This was ...

After a gap of more than two years, I found myself playing an avatar game again. While the pandemic lockdowns are thankfully a thing of the past, extreme flooding in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul left some of the local venues closed down in a similar way, reliant on offering their rooms in a play from home format to make it through. Currently this is the only room at this venue playable in this style, and it’s offered as a 90 minute experience in expectation that players take longer w...

As far as I could ascertain, there are no escape rooms in Tashkent that can be played in English - the primary language used in the game is Russian. Lovushka Kvest was the only company that I got a reply from, and they made it clear that some materials would use Russian language, but if we wanted to try playing they had no objections. Our host spoke fairly decent English, which was encouraging; I also persuaded them to let me take my phone in, against their normal rules, so that I could use Goog...

Tuzak, which is Turkish for Trap, is located in the Asian half of Istanbul, and currently run just this one game, though I believe in the past they’re operated more. Escape from Heist is based on the TV series Money Heist (La Casa del Papel), though apart from use of the iconic Dali mask I didn’t recognise all that many references to the show.

Even with the additional cost for playing in English, this was an inexpensive escape room, so I wasn’t expecting high-tech glitz. But while I think it wa...

We’d missed Kryptos on our first visit to Sofia six years earlier, and almost missed it this time too, but managed to find time for a trip to it before leaving, and were thoroughly glad we’d done so. On booking we had to choose between ‘normal’ and ‘hard’ mode, and chose the latter; as we discovered later, the difference is that a couple of the puzzles are presented in trickier versions, with less to clue you what to do.

Kryptos is the name of a real-life sculpture that exists at the CIA headqu...

I really want to like Road to Freedom. It has so much going for it, starting with the original setting in which you are Bulgarian partisans in 1876, striving for national independence from the Ottoman Empire. This room looks impressive and immersive from the start, and turns out to be spacious in a way few rooms are, successfully evoking a feeling of being in 19th Century Bulgaria with its detailed and plausibly authentic decor.

In several places the puzzles show real creativity and charm in de...

A Bulgarian room with a Spanish name, El Patrón (think ‘The Godfather’) is based around 80s drug lord Pablo Escobar. We were DEA agents, and apparently we were trying to find a ledger full of evidence, though we may have lost track of that during the game and focused on picking up cash instead. In any case, this isn’t a score-based or particularly story-driven room; you solve puzzles until you reach the finish.

The puzzles are of course heavily themed around drugs and the Colombian narcotics tr...

It was only when en route to Enigmania that we discovered the game’s unusual requirement: that we each bring a small personal item. This needed some quick improvisation, though fortunately they weren’t too picky about the items we provided - there’s no need to bring along your grandmother’s wedding ring or your child’s first baby tooth. But that was an indication that with this room the company is trying to do something a little different, a little more distinctive. The way we were met and led i...

I’ve played several escape games built within museums, and none were like this. For one, BioXcape is not actually in the body of the museum; you enter via a side entrance, and descend into a genuine military bunker. And, thanks to the freedom of having this dedicated space, it has lighting effects and electronics that might not be possible in a space shared with public exhibits.

Bioxcape is designed as an educational game, to teach the threat of ecological destruction. Where entertainment has a...

Funky Monkey’s first game Rebellion was in fact designed by Codex in Bucharest - which is a point in its favour, based on the visit I made to that company some years back. In it you’re infiltrating a secret society so as to unmask the members of the inner cabal, though this is set in a future dystopia where the conspiracy rules the world. That allows Rebellion to blend the sort of decor you might expect from a Masonic lodge with grungy futuristic theming, a combination that worked surprisingly ...

Two of the three rooms at Infinity Escape have a magic school theme, and we dived straight in with the second and more recent of those; which has a story inspired by the second book in a certain series of novels. When booking this room you have the option of selecting an unusual add-on, a 15 minute ‘Mystic Wands’ extra experience, and we played with that included.

This turned out to be an immersive theatre interlude, partway through the escape room though with the timer paused, based around pur...

Back in Sofia for the first time in six years, we played The First Hunt as the first room on a mini-binge. For now it’s the only game available at the venue, and has a fantasy historical theme involving a witch and a curse.

Our host explained the usual game rules within the logic of that setting, which got things off to an entertaining start. He also emphasised that there was no clock and this wasn’t a game to hurry through, but rather a story-led adventure. That matched the atmosphere inside, ...

From the name I guessed this would be a sequel to Saint Rumoldus, but it is in fact a stand-alone story. And a thoroughly original one too - pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve entered a room playing the role of air conditioning maintenance worker.

Hans’ Revenge placed in the worldwide top ten TERPECAs for 2023, so expectations were high. And there’s an instant slickness as the game begins, not just the high production quality of the intro video but the way you’re directed from one space to a...

I would never have guessed from the name that Here I Am is a prison escape theme. But then I wouldn’t have guessed that their previous room Bella Ciao was a robbery theme. In both cases the game is inspired by a television drama which I hadn’t seen at time of playing, and many details and references were lost on me as a result.

Even if I wasn’t familiar with the world it was creating, Here I Am creates a vivid setting. Or rather a series of them, a different style of decor and puzzles at each s...

At time of writing Stay In The Dark is in its last month of operation, with every remaining slot sold out, and no chance of further extension - so either you’ve already played it or you’ve missed your chance. It’s a game to describe with superlatives: at 2.5 hours long it’s the longest game I’ve played outside Athens, and it takes place in the largest set I’ve seen anywhere.

The location is in a rundown district in Vlaardingen, not at either of DarkPark’s normal venues. We arrived and wandered ...

Breakout have an interesting location at the top of The Machinist, a historic building that used to be a naval academy. Our game was built in a converted attic space, with old floorboards and ominous nooks and crannies that immediately gave the experience a quality of atmosphere that’s difficult to achieve in standard commercial premises.

The Caretaker is as it sounds a creepy game, involving a kidnapped student who you need to rescue. The challenge for companies using that sort of premise is t...

I instantly liked Book of Mystery, and found little to change that first impression. From the moment of entry there’s a multitude of interesting or cool things to catch your eye; this is the opposite of stripped down minimalism.

The plot is the bit that’s stripped down, in that there’s very little of it; officially it’s something about a mysterious book and dark forces, but essentially you’re in a house full of occult symbols and arcane objects, and you need to find your way out.

But the house...

Enigma010 have two rooms and we played both of them, starting with Enigma. I’d wondered if it were a WW2 theme, then saw the game artwork and decided it must be a superhero story. That wasn’t entirely correct; the main villain has that sort of style, but feel of the game is grittier and closer to a crime story than the bright primary colours of a superhero theme.

Enigma’s decor is based around concrete and metal and computer screens, in sharp contrast to the lush interior of the company’s other...

My first impression of Escape World was of a rather chaotic venue, but I think that was the fault of the hen group who were on their way out. Once they’d gone and the staff emerged from hiding, it was a lot calmer.

The Golden Ticket takes inspiration from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; you must first find the eponymous ticket in the sweet shop where it’s hidden, then pass the tests of the chocolate factory.

This is a cute and brightly coloured game, all the more so as it progresses. There’...

The top rooms in the Netherlands tend to sell out weeks or months in advance, and even booking six weeks ahead of time we were very fortunate to be able to grab a weekend slot for The Alchemist. Because although it wasn’t the game for which we’d decided to visit the Netherlands, for me it was the exquisite highlight of the trip.

The experience here is carefully crafted from the start, including the briefing and even the confirmation email, which are used to set up the story and the scene. Sherl...

In terms of reputation to live up to, it’s hard to beat being the current TERPECA #1. Hype can damage enjoyment of a game, and in any case there is always huge variation between individuals as to which games they like best, so it’s always best to go into such highly rated rooms with expectations firmly under control. But still: there is good reason Molly’s Game is famous.

The game description gives only a teaser of what the story is, which is a sign either of a room where the storyline matters ...

For me this room will be more memorable than most, because it was the first one I booked into solo. On my own in Zadar for a few days, that was the only way to play it; the venue seemed a little bemused by my request but happy enough to let me try.

ClueGo is currently the only escape company in Zadar; the company also runs a site in Zagreb and an outdoor game in Split. Of the two rooms here I went for Morana mainly because it was a 75 minute game. The story follows fairy tale tradition with the...

Escape Hunt doesn’t always have a great reputation; the games of theirs that I’ve played have been a mixed bag. That shouldn’t put you off trying Eye of the Sun God. It’s probably the best of theirs I’ve played at any of the chain’s branches, and is genuinely worth going out of your way for.

That’s partly because of the pretty decor, though that’s often a strong point for Escape Hunt games. But they’ve done a fine job of evoking a lost temple sort of environment here.

More importantly, the puz...

The problem with doing 24 escape rooms in the space of a long weekend is that it tends to blur many of the details of the games in memory, such as individual puzzles. But if my recollection of Crimson Lake Motel is hazier than normal, that’s not because the game was forgettable; in fact it was probably the best of the half dozen games I’ve played at Breakout, across their various branches.

The story is straightforward; you’ve checked into what should be a luxury getaway but is actually a dubiou...

Honestly, my favourite part of Frankenstein is a section of the decor, which is exceedingly pretty but not actually part of the game. Which isn’t to say that Frankenstein is a bad room, but there’s not a great deal that reaches a higher standard than ‘pleasant’.

It’s an attractive Gothic sort of set, in keeping with the theme. You might find you get off to a slow start, at least if (like me) observation is not your strong point; fortunately I had teammates who were sharper eyed.

Much of the ga...

The name is arguably misleading: Espionage is much more a prison game than a spy theme: one of your group has been arrested and you need to break them out, and also they’re a spy.

Our third room at Adrenaline’s Atherton branch was, like the others, a mostly padlock-based game that we completed at speed. I’d put it narrowly ahead of Missing, making it my favourite of the three, due to solid puzzles and probably the nicest visuals.