Escape Room Centre: Secret of the Tomb

TRAP tomb

Outside the room

A brief break and we were back to play the Escape Centre’s other room. There’s actually another copy of this TRAP-designed game in Cambridge, a mere hour from where I live, but the stars had aligned for Blackpool, so I thought I’d make the most of our time. Not much had changed in the intervening half hour but I did get a chance to chat to our game host about the plans for future games – two more TRAP rooms are due to open up in late September (and even better – neither of them are present in Budapest, so it doesn’t affect my trip over in September).

Background

Brent Chadwick had a rough childhood. He grew up in the shadow of his mother, Lucille, who was the founder of the “Church of the Untemptables” (COTU). The COTU was a Christian-fundamentalist church in the eighties that preached: “Resist all temptations, but if you aren’t able to resist, you still have the chance of salvation if you punish yourselves equal to the sin you have committed.” So no wonder Brent went crazy and, after his mother died, moved to a hidden room – the very room you are about to enter. This strange place is full of traps. The only way to escape is to find the urn of Lucille’s ashes. If you fail and are still here after an hour, Brent will arrive home and I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when he does.

Inside the room

Wow. This room was different. It was still nicely constructed but it had an entirely different feel to the Egyptian room. As befits the theme, the decor felt overwhelming with too much information to process at first glance. We got stuck in and, once again, it felt like the puzzles were nicely arranged to allow you to flow through the game. It’s a more linear game than the Egyptian room but there’s still some opportunity to go off and explore puzzles separately.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that the room makes use of darkness to a significant (although not overwhelming) extent. Now I’m the first to criticise rooms that use darkness to increase the difficulty, but they seemed to get a good balance here. I can’t remember ever finding the darkness a real nuisance. That might change if you had more players, as we had to share a single light source.

There’s one particularly frustrating skill-based part to the game that took us over ten minutes to complete. The first couple of minutes was fun but it rapidly became frustrating. I’m immensely patient (much to my downfall in some games where I refuse to ask for a clue) but this crossed the line even for me. I think they’ll need to do something to fix up this part of the game because, as far as I can tell, there’s no way for them to bypass it. Be warned – if you take along a team of people who are a little less tall then you’re going to really struggle with this one…

That aside, there are plenty of physical puzzles to delight but, unlike the Egyptian room, there’s also the usual run of “find the number (or word)” padlock puzzles. Plenty of the puzzles didn’t really fit the theme but they were fun nonetheless, and I think you’ll find yourself enjoying them if you don’t get caught up in asking why they’d be present in the room.

You’re told at the beginning exactly what you have to do to escape in this game, and so it was clear when we were just a single puzzle from the end of the game. I really struggled to see what we were meant to do here but fortunately, after a few minutes of wracking our brains, Mrs Logic had a moment of triumph and spotted how to solve the final puzzle. A good puzzle is hard but gives you all the information you need and, most importantly, when you find the answer you’ll be absolutely certain you know what to do. That was the case here. As soon as she suggested the answer, I knew immediately that it was correct and was frustrated I hadn’t seen it earlier.

Result

We escaped the room after around 48 minutes without taking any clues.

Verdict –

This is another great TRAP game. If you prefer more involved puzzles, then you’ll probably prefer the Egyptian room but, if searching the room and finding hidden codes is more your thing, then this will probably be more up your street. Again, there’s a worry that a good team could blitz through this game – the linearity probably protects you from that a bit but the flip side is that a large team might get bored, feeling like they’re blocked on one particular puzzle at a time and can’t put their brains to good use. Given that, I’d recommend that enthusiasts go along with a team of three for maximum enjoyment. First-timers should be fine taking the full complement.

Detailed Room Ratings

Venue
Host
Wow! factor
Immersiveness
Difficulty

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