Tulleys Escape: Spellcraft

Spellcraft is the fifth of Tulley’s full-size escape games, and shares much with the first four: it’s huge and impressive and slick, and packed with enough puzzles that even experienced teams will have to scramble to complete it in time. But while the house style and quality remains a constant, the company continues to try new things with each new game.

The first surprise was to find that we’d be divided into two groups, working for good or evil respectively. An escape room is a fundamentally cooperative experience, and making it competitive without spoiling the fun is extremely difficult – however, without giving anything away, there was little danger of that here. Most of the gameplay is fully cooperative, and any rivalry is only a minor part of the game.

Although Spellcraft clearly takes inspiration from the Harry Potter franchise, it’s much less based on it than are most of the magic school themed rooms available elsewhere. One of the joys of the game is the great variety in set design between different areas, in a space that leaves you immersed and disoriented.

It’s also the most technologically advanced of the Tulleys rooms so far. Tech in no way guarantees a better game, and has its drawbacks; for us one tech element was annoyingly unresponsive. However tech expands what’s possible, and is used here to create a variety of effects that complement and deepen the ‘magic’ theme, including a certain thing near the end that was my personal highlight of the game.

Like their other games, every time you think you must be on the final puzzle, it turns out there’s another section beyond it, and usually another after that. Spellcraft seems not quite as hard as Nethercott or Dodge, but is still far more packed with puzzles than a typical game, and as with the others you need to divide and conquer, and also avoid wasting any time, to have a chance of completing it.

In many respects Spellcraft is objectively the most advanced of the Tulleys games. Whether you like it the best or prefer one of the others will come down to how your game goes – but it’s unquestionably in the top rank of U.K. escape rooms.