Worcester, Jun 2019
Alice in Wonderland provides ample inspiration for escape rooms; the whimsical setting lends itself well to puzzles as well as to an attractive, flamboyant or surreal style of decoration. Cyber Q’s take on the theme draws on the source material with enthusiasm to create a varied and strikingly pretty environment. This story has you searching for a vanished Alice, starting not in Wonderland but in Alice’s bedroom. It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say that, of course, that’s only a starting point for the game, and you can expect a delightful version of Wonderland inspired by various characters from the original book.
The lovely surroundings were a little compromised by the abundant warning stickers, liberally placed to warn over-eager players off the more delicate decorations. But although the quantity of them made them hard to ignore completely, they only detracted a little.
In addition to the impressive decor, puzzles are varied and inventive, with plenty of more physical ideas that suited the theme well. Even so, curiously, our group found the game
a little flat. One reason for that may have been tiredness from a busy weekend schedule of games, but a couple of things in the room contributed to it. One was that a couple of mechanisms seemed slow to respond to their solutions, enough so that I wasn’t sure if in the end our gamemaster had manually triggered the release. The other was the use of a diary as a source of clue information throughout the game. The diary itself was beautifully presented, but searching for clues in a small book is always less engrossing than searching for them in the room itself; and as so often with this trope, the book’s cryptic clues were interspersed with distraction text and made deliberately obscure. There’s nothing that lets the air out of a game like struggling to guess the correct way to interpret a wilfully ambiguous piece of text.
a little flat. One reason for that may have been tiredness from a busy weekend schedule of games, but a couple of things in the room contributed to it. One was that a couple of mechanisms seemed slow to respond to their solutions, enough so that I wasn’t sure if in the end our gamemaster had manually triggered the release. The other was the use of a diary as a source of clue information throughout the game. The diary itself was beautifully presented, but searching for clues in a small book is always less engrossing than searching for them in the room itself; and as so often with this trope, the book’s cryptic clues were interspersed with distraction text and made deliberately obscure. There’s nothing that lets the air out of a game like struggling to guess the correct way to interpret a wilfully ambiguous piece of text.
Even if the game didn’t completely grab us there’s plenty to recommend it – first and foremost the pretty Wonderland decor and charming props. The multi step puzzle required to unlock the main part of the game was clever, reinforced with suitable sound effects and delivered a good payoff when solved. I’m left with the impression of an attractive, acceptably pleasant game that falls short of its potential, but which really just needs a little fine-tuning to reduce ambiguities. 
