London

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AI Escape (London): Project Ðelta

Another unusual escape room from a company that just doesn’t do mainstream games. Lots of story and hard puzzles – probably too much for some people! Oh, and did I mention that it’s 100 minutes!

A Door in a Wall (London): Memento Mori

A fun medium-length mystery from A Door in a Wall. Blink and you’ll miss it though – this was a one weekend only event that took place at the end of August.

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Breakout Rooms (Watford): The Lost City

A far better experience than their first room in pretty much every department: better puzzles, better decoration, better reveals. It’s not somewhere you’d head to specifically to play, but it’s a fun enough experience for the Watford locals or if you’re passing through.

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Breakout Rooms (Watford): Spy Games

A game that would have been reasonably well received three years ago but now feels lacking. Fun for new players but with almost no decoration and basic puzzles, you’d be far better off heading to the centre of London.

A Door in a Wall (London): Dead Man's Hand

Dead Man’s Hand wasn’t my favourite of the A Door in a Wall games but it’s still a very enjoyable experience and I suspect that we went a long just a little too early to fully appreciate it.

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Mission Breakout (London): The Lost Passenger

From start to finish, a game that kept delivering impressive reveals with a real sense of exploring our way through the story. Solid puzzles kept us entertained although we did feel lost on a couple of occasions in the game.

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AIM Escape (London): Patient Zero 2150

This was a fun game with a variety of challenges and a fantastic set, but I can’t help but feel that it fell short of its potential. This could be a fantastic mission if they smooth out some of the puzzles and enhance the finale – fingers crossed they manage that.

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AIM Escape (London): Psychopath's Den

A room with real potential, but with too many rough edges. Issues with audio and lighting greatly affected our enjoyment and the finale lost some of its potential impact. A solid set of challenges, including some real crowd-pleasers, at the core of the game suggest that it could definitely do well with the right tweaking.

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Aftermath the Game (London): On the Brink

A fun, pleasantly chaotic game with a real sense of investigation and an interesting overarching storyline. The logic felt a little shaky at times, and the puzzle content could have been better but it was impressive that they’d managed to squeeze an eight-player game into little more than a suitcase.