Bury, Apr 2022
In a great example of how not to get your escape room sponsored by the US tourist board, Compendium’s horror room starts with the premise that you impulsively take a side trip into Alabama and shortly thereafter find yourself searching the house of a deranged serial killer. Your task is not just to get out, but to find a can of gasoline for your car plus also the mobile phones of the killer’s previous victims.
Of Compendium’s four rooms, I thought the decor in Wrong Turn was perhaps the most immersive, in the sense of greatest realism. The macabre nasties are more effect for being mixed with rural homeliness. While the premise is scary, I found it more gory than frightening, with some touches of dark humour mixed in.
As with Bedlam, there were plenty of padlocks and often multiple four digit ones available at the same time, meaning we needed to try codes in multiple places. However, each puzzle was clear and logical in a way that meant, once solved, we could be confident of the code. It did go in for the ‘disturbing graffiti’ decor idea a little much for me, something which tends to cause accidental red herrings, but in practice the only two steps that I remember confusing us were due to things we’d misunderstood or failed to notice.
Between the great set-building and the fair, logical puzzles, I’d probably put this as my second highest recommendation of the four games at the venue. 