The escape room (pronounced "ess-cap-pay" by the Girl) is something we're rather fond of, both of us enjoying puzzles and fearing the sun.
Thus far, we've had a go at the Cambridge Escape Rooms and the Lockhouse Escape Games on Regent Street, and found our experiences a bit variable. The Lockhouse games (egyptology to be specific) felt a little less well put together, requiring more clues than I feel should be necessary.
Now, the obvious reason for that is that we're just a bit thick, and aren't very good at puzzles. However, I've done enough of them now to realise there are certain things that make a good escape room.
You need a decent range of puzzle types, solutions which are impossible to miss once you've got to the end of the logic chain, and enough things going on that nobody gets bored due to one or two people solving everything. It's nice to have multiple streams of events, so that you've always got two things in action.
Luckily, the Secret Lab of the Locked In Edinburgh escape rooms, currently operating in the Summerhall fulfils those requirements nicely. We did it with a team of four, and succeeded in about 53 minutes, with a total of three clues. (It's nice to do it with none, but that's generally quite tricky.)
The premise of the Secret Lab is that you need to generate an anti-virus, but the plots are always only there for set dressing. The meat is very much the puzzles. This had some good ones, which required hand-eye coordination, a bit of mathematics, some picture recognition, and a few perspective tricks that I've not seen before that I was rather impresssed by.
I wouldn't have wanted to attempt it with less than four, because we were more or less all active throughout the entire 53 minutes, and you do need a few brains to look at things in different ways.
Probably the best one I've played thus far. Shame the site is up in Edinburgh.
Tagged: Event Escape room