Cannock, Mar 2024
We’d booked two games at The Puzzle Room Cannock, so continued on from Emergency Landing to Tunnel. This one is designed in a split team communicative style where half the team is in the light section and half is in the dark section, and must work together despite the separation. With only two of us, that meant one person in each section, and I took the dark half.
Thirty minutes in, we’d only managed to solve the first one or two puzzles, depending how you count them. The quantity of puzzles in this room is low, and I suspect that reflects a high proportion of time being stuck for most teams. This time there was no uncertainty about which padlock a code should be used with, at least once we grasped the way the room works and got going properly. On the other hand, with almost all of the locks we had some degree of uncertainty as to what answer the clues were telling us – which direction to take the numbers in, or whether a particular digit of the code was one thing or another, and so on.
On the plus side the room looked more atmospheric than Emergency Landing, at least in my half. The audio noises added to that, though also made communication harder.
The staff were uniformly friendly and pleasant. The game however was for me fifty minutes of frustration in the dark, with the questionable benefit of making me better appreciate the good points of the one we’d played immediately before it. As with that room, I understand that it’s not aimed at escape enthusiasts; but then if this had been my first escape experience, I doubt I’d have played another. 