Escape Hunt Oxford: The Fourth Samurai

I'd add a warning that this is a room well suited to playing as a pair, which could work less with with a bigger group - an early puzzle could become a frustrating bottleneck, since it's potentially time consuming and can only be tackled by one person at a time, and the rest is fairly linear. Most enthusiast pairs will also find it an entirely approachable level of difficulty.

Playing the same game on a later occasion and in a different location (Oxford), I found the aesthetics quietly appealin...

I have to admit, The Fourth Samurai wasn’t ever going to be my immediate choice of the Escape Hunt games 

Escape Hunt- The Fourth Samurai

July 2023

Overview 

This was our first visit to Escape Hunt. Escape hunt is well know across Exeter and with a number of rooms to chose from, we decided to give one of their more challenging rooms a try as our first attempt, The Fourth Samurai.  

The location is easy to find in the middle of the city. There is some public parking nearby with a short 5 minute walk to the venue. You enter into a multi sport bar with axe throwing and darts downstairs. We approached the main desk and were escorted upstairs to the games area where we were greeted by our host for the game. 

The briefing area and waiting area is actually quite small and compact for the number of rooms they have available. It is clear that the focus at Escape Hunt is quick turnaround to maximise profit instead of customer experience. Whilst we were receiving our brief in the corridor, two separate parties had to squeeze through us, interrupting the brief and this caused us to lose a little interest into the experience before we had even started. One of us was nominated as group leader where they were the only one who could see when walking in and we were taken into room where we began our mission.

Room impression

The first thing to mention is larger groups will struggle in this room. We are a team of 4 and the beginning of the game was a real struggle for us. Only one of you can really start the game and it left us quite frustrated. Once we had a good look around the room, the background music and decoration did help us immerse us into the game somewhat but when we started going trough the puzzles and getting a closer look at detail, the room was actually quite tired and you could make out where old games had been adapted because of breakage etc. This did let the room down as it did have real promise and I dare say when it was new, it would have been quite an impressive room. 

Puzzles

The first puzzle frustrated us, me in particular a lot. They gave us the option to just skip the puzzle and they would let us move on. This started the room off in a slightly negative tone for us and made us feel like there was no point int he puzzle if we can just move on. The puzzles had a linear approach where it felt as if there was enough for all 4 of us to do. There were a few sticking points that had us scratching our heads. Due to the theme of the room, padlocks were a no show with many combination locks and puzzles taking centre stage. The different areas of the game opened up different aspects of the story which was a nice touch and kept the theme flowing throughout. 

Game Master Clues

There was no timer in the room so we were unsure how long we had during our game and a couple of times where we became stuck, there was a quiet voice that came over the room to point us in the right direction with a screen. There seemed to be a slight delay in some of the ‘happenings’ in the room after we had completed a puzzle so this did suggest to us that our game master was overseeing another room as well. We might be wrong but our previous experience in rooms does lead us to this conclusion. This isn’t the end of the world as long as the room flows properly, this felt a little sluggish at points.

Round Up

We have wanted to try out Escape Hunt for a while after other escape room owners have suggested we give this particle room a try. We would say the room was fun for novices and probably enthusiasts but for pro’s it might be a bit too sluggish and not overly challenging. The company is there to obviously make money but the churning over of customers and lack of customer interaction wasn’t really for us and this showed in the hosting. One to try and we would probably come back to try the other rooms as it was a decent room but there are better out there, particularly in Exeter.