Salisbury, Jan 2022
Salisbury Escape Rooms seems to rarely get mentioned in enthusiast discussions, and it’s true that their games aren’t likely to make experienced players’ top ten lists; but I’ve learned to expect reliably creative, enjoyable games from them, and so far have not been disappointed.
Pre-pandemic the venue created a new game each year in the same physical space. Death at the Lab is the sixth in the sequence, and has run for longer due to lockdown closures; and following a change of ownership the company are due to expand to a second location before replacing this game.
The company has an ongoing detective theme to their games, and that’s followed in a more traditional way here than in their previous room: a professor has been murdered, and you must find the perpetrator from a list of suspects via a process of elimination.
This is a game that prizes variety and fun over immersion or naturalistic design, and although the puzzles are often themed for the setting there’s no pretence that they’re anything but puzzles. In perhaps too many cases this involves putting some digits together to make a padlock code; but it also includes several obvious highlights, including a couple of pieces of equipment that I haven’t seen in an escape room before. And even if individual puzzles often don’t have any particular relevance to the story, the murder mystery premise holds things together.
Like the previous game I played at the venue, there’s a very well-defined structure to the game, being broadly linear but often non-linear within a given section, and with a clear feeling of progress towards the goal. In this case the goal is identifying the correct suspect. Detective work by elimination is a trope I’m not so keen on, but is implemented very well here, thanks to the way you’re expected to perform that elimination and the means provided to do so, and thanks to the total lack of any ambiguity or need to resort to guesswork.
By the standards of escape rooms in 2022, Death at the Lab is somewhat old fashioned in style and appearance, with plenty of paper-based prompts and padlock codes, and relatively simple decor. But it also boasts very solid puzzle logic throughout, and several cool tasks that many teams will be talking about some time after playing. I found it not quite as impressive as the one I’d played before at the venue, due to a somewhat less ambitious design and a slightly greater tendency to bottleneck for our team of four; but it’s still a good example of how an older style of game can be better than many slicker, higher budget ones, by virtue of creative ideas combined with strong puzzle design. 
