Houdini’s Escape Room Experience Southampton: Poppa Plock’s Wonky Workshop

A few months ago I noticed that Houdini's Escape Room were advertising a new room called Poppa Plocks Wonky Workshop, an 18+ room and the adverts for it gave it a dark tone, so of course, once our busy October period was through I had to make sure that my first stop after scare season was to Houdini's to experience this room. Poppa Plock's Wonky Workshop is actually a relocated escape from from the now non operational Handmade Myserties. I met up with some friends and we entered this wonderful escape room. We had all previously done at least one other room by them in the fantastic RMS Titanic so all of us knew the level that this company could do. We arrived and were greeted by a wonderful guy who checked us in and told us to take a seat. After a small wait and a couple of games of Pucket we were taken to the briefing cinema room. We filled out the forms and had a lovely chat with the guy (Whose name escapes me, sorry). He told us to wait here and we would be collected for our room shortly.

Houdinis Escape Tenpin Southampton: Poppa Plock’s Wonky Workshop

November 2022

Overview 

This was third visit to Houdini’s in Southampton after visiting Onslow Road to complete Titanic and the previous day taking on Extinct at the Tenpin location. Due to the escape rooms being located at a huge bowling alley, there is plenty of parking on site. There is a big waiting area with plenty of seating before being taken into the start of the main brief. There is a refreshment area and a sideboard selling a lot of home escape games. We were taken to an old cinema style room with popcorn machine and cinema screen ready to show us our brief. The host was brilliant in going straight into character and taking us to our room to start.

Room impression

The room was decorated brilliantly, completely emerging yourself into an old toy workshop with dusty old games, cabinets and dim lighting. It was hard to tell if some of the props were old and tattered and needed replacing or whether it was part of the immersive experience. Our game master set up the scene well, explaining what our mission was. We haven’t done a game based on an old toy workshop and we all enjoyed exploring the different areas of the workshop and being immersed into the theme of it all with toy music being played in the background. 

Puzzles

There was nothing groundbreaking in the puzzles of this room, padlocks mixed in with some coded games and some old fashioned arcade games for fun. You can easily see your progress in the room with the big lights being lit when you completed a puzzle. One thing we did enjoy was the game master coming in and out of the room completely in character. Normally you would think this would ruin the immersive experience but it actually added a nice element to the game and something we have not experienced before. Some negative points, one of the games broke when we were attempting it and it took the game master to come in and fix it half way through and one puzzle in particular was really tricky for us to solve due to poor lighting and positioning of some of the elements of the puzzle. This put quite a big dampener on the room for us as we spent a lot of time on this puzzle and made us being very close the finish line in terms of time. The finish however was really good and again, something we have not done before.

Game Master Clues

We had to ask for some help on the one puzzle mentioned above due to us simply not being able to work it out and the game master came into the room in character to assist us. She also came in to the room on another occasion to point us in the right direction when we deviated but for the most of the game, she left us to it.

Round Up

After completing Extinct and Titanic over the course of the weekend, we did have high hoped for this room and if we being honest, we felt it lacked a little something compared to the others. The a puzzle breaking and one of them appearing to be very difficult to solve for a combination of reasons, it just put a dampener on the game. During a few moments of the game where the puzzles were linear, a few of the areas were quite tight and some of us were stood around watching whilst others were completing tasks. For bigger teams, this might be much more of an issue. None the less, the experience of the room and the theme were good and it is worth trying when visiting Southampton.

Handmade Mysteries are famous for the quality of their hosts, who are costumed and in character from the outset, and Poppa Plock upholds that reputation - Wynne was excellent.

The large space is a big change, and an improvement, on Handmade's previous game, which for bigger teams could get a little cramped. It's also packed with gadgets and geegaws. With loud audio and a stream of suggestions from the hint doll in the corner, it approaches overwhelming, at least until you start to get a grip on...