Review

- Overall rating:
Clue Adventures: The Book of Secrets

A game that literally puts some magic back into escape rooms. This is a tough escape room with lots of puzzles and plenty of challenge – possibly too much for a lot of teams. Take a biggish group along and keep your focus and you’ll have plenty of fun.

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The Panic Room (Harlow): The Witch House

A good second outing from the Panic Room that demonstrated their improved craft in creating rooms. What they’d lost in sheer size and volume of puzzles, they’d made up for in creativity and theme. I’m excited to see what their future games will be like.

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The Panic Room (Harlow): The Panic Room

A fun game with plenty of puzzles but felt a bit lacking in theming and story. A reasonable introduction for beginners but experienced players may find it a little on the easy side even with small teams.

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Bewilder Box

That rare gem – a room genuinely worth travelling for. Excellent introduction, games masters, puzzles and theming combined to make this a really enjoyable game.

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Escape Game Brighton: Laboratory of a Madman

A short and simple game which would have been entirely unmemorable were it not for a couple of higher tech puzzles. Not enough to redeem it but enough to make me feel it wasn’t entirely without merit.

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Trapped In: Crazy Clown's Carnival

A small, well themed game with a shortage of true puzzles and an emphasis on searching, observation and, in particular, skill challenges. The finale is extended and likely to be something that teams love or loathe.

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Trapped In: Ruby Factory

A fun game where you’ll definitely get your money’s worth – most likely playing almost the full sixty minutes. A wide variety of puzzles, a fun scoring mechanism and an inevitably stressful finale made this a joy to play. The only drawbacks were a safety issue in the room and some temperamental props but in spite of those I’d heartily recommend.

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Mission Breakout: Codebreakers

A game that really gets you into the spirit of the Second World War codebreakers. If you can cope with a slightly claustrophobic couple of minutes, some loud noise early on and a little bit of frustration in a later puzzle then I think you’ll have an amazing time. If you’ve interested in the work at Bletchley Park during the war then I think this is a must do. Oh, and it’s inside a disused Underground station!

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Do Stuff: Hostage Hideout

A game that took escape room logic to a whole new level with me continually feeling a disconnect between the very specific storyline they’d chosen and the nonsensical puzzling we performed. If you ignore that, there are a variety of enjoyable puzzles with one or two that you’ll find novel as well as one that you might find incredibly frustrating. Beautifully hosted with clues provided at appropriate moments.

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ClueTrace: Mind Crime

A cleverly themed room that did a wonderful job of evoking the mind in a physical space but that was let down by a collection of puzzles that felt more like they had been randomly thrown in than careful collected to allow you to flow through the game.