Epsom, Jan 2023
Mr Crabheal has a mixed up mind; specifically, he has multiple personalities. And if there’s one thing that fiction teaches us about multiple personality disorder, it’s that (at least) one of the personalities is going to be a dangerous lunatic, and this one is planning something nasty. Fortunately, Mr Crabheal’s other five personalities are rooting for you, so this should be easy, right?
Escape From The Room is a venue that focuses on puzzles first and foremost. Don’t expect to be bowled over by a very elaborate immersive environment when you enter; the layout is fairly stripped back. The structure is based around Mr Crabheal’s six personalities, and while the decor is fairly simple, they’ve put a lot of work into making each personality clear and distinct, and building puzzles around each of them. And there are a lot of puzzles: officially 37, though you could make a case for there being 42 or even more.
We initially thought that we’d need to work through each personality one at a time. There was a sudden change of pace when we realised that wasn’t true – before then, the three of us kept bottlenecking in the narrow space, and after that we split up to deal with the sudden huge swathe of puzzles that were all simultaneously available.
Having puzzles everywhere you look is a dream come true for a lot of players, and if that’s you, you’ll likely have a great time in this room. It suits my tastes less well: I like to see everything, preferably be involved in completing everything, and I definitely don’t like leaving anything unsolved. And I sometimes get puzzle paralysis when there’s too much available to tackle at once. For all those reasons I didn’t get into the flow of Mr Crabheal as much as I’d have liked to.
However the way the game is structured goes a long way to keeping things manageable. The puzzles resolve to words in almost all cases, each of which lets you place a marker on a board – so you’re not juggling lots of padlock codes, and there’s never any ambiguity about digit order or anything of that sort. Nor is there any confirmation that you have an answer correct, until the very end, when you find out how many of your answers are correct, and whether you have won the game or not. That means you’re pretty much guaranteed a full 60 minutes of game time, as well as a tense dramatic ending.
This being Escape From The Room, the puzzle logic is also completely solid. The emphasis is on quantity and variety, more likely to leave you thinking ‚that’s clever‘ than ‚oh wow‘, but they all resolve clearly – which is particularly important given you don’t get immediate confirmation they way you would with a padlock.
As a game, the appeal of Mr Crabheal depends quite a lot on personal taste: what you look for in a game and also how you play as a team. It’s perfect for groups that look for puzzles above all, are happy to divide and conquer, and like score-based games. That’s not me, and I’d have preferred to play it with extended time and complete everything (which is an option Escape From The Room offer for a couple of their games, but I believe not this one at present). However, I do like a blast of pure puzzle solving challenge, and that’s exactly what this delivers: a cocktail of serotonin and adrenaline as you bash through the puzzles and as you realise how many still remain. 