Eltham Escape Rooms: Nightmare on Ripper Street

The second room we played at Eltham was their Jack The Ripper game, which involves a little gore and jumpiness but is a sufficiently mild form of horror that most players should be fine with it.

You’re trying to capture the Ripper and believe you have found his lair – where, in the best horror movie tradition of bad decision making, you decide to split up and enter from different directions.

At time of writing, Ripper is the venue’s newest game, and in most respects it looks like a big step up for them. Clever set design makes the space feel considerably larger than it actually is, and gives a sense of progression and exploration through different phases each with a different aesthetic. They’ve clearly put a lot of work into atmospherics to make it dramatic and a little creepy; it’s executed with imagination and flair, and has clear potential to be an excellent game.

On my visit, I thought it fell some way short of that potential, primarily because of the puzzle design. Both halves of the split start involved puzzles that, to varying extents, seemed unintuitive and ambiguous. In one case that was aggravated by the dim lighting and atmospherics. That makes it likely that one half or another of a team with end up frustratingly struck more or less right from the start; and of course if one half gets blocked, the other half will end up also stuck waiting on them.

A smaller gripe was that, as with the other game we played at the venue, the tech sometimes seemed a bit fussy. That meant we’d place the whatsits on the wherevers, get no reaction, and then a pre-recorded voice telling us to check our solution; but then after a round or two of double-checking and slightly jiggling the items, it would suddenly trigger the mechanism after all.

This game is both cool and ambitious, and I’d really like to be able to score it more highly. There’s plenty to wow players – but the nitty gritty of the gameplay undermines the impressive staging. It was still overall a fun experience, but too often that was despite the puzzles not because of them.