Escape Live Birmingham: Dr Watson’s Office

I can highly recommend this room! Having now completed Escape Live Birmingham's traditional rooms, this was one of their best. It's very traditional, so it's a great starter room, if you're new to Escapes. It was very traditional in terms of tech too. As a team, this was one of our fastest rooms, but I don't think that's because it's the easiest. I think it was just slightly unoriginal, so we've seen a lot of similar puzzles before. That's why I think this is a great starter room. The hosting was brilliant - and we had no clues! It was lovely to have the space we required to attempt the game ourselves, and we could dictate the when we wanted clues.

A major, major plus point for us is that everything worked! It's a well kept room, which allowed us to focus on game play and no need for the GM to intervene. Perfect. 

As a team, we also prefer non-linear games, and this fit the bill. 

This was our first ever room. And we've been hooked ever since. 

Our GM was brilliant straight away, getting right into character and giving us the back story. She was also very helpful when we had to ring her for help (which considering this was our first room, wasn't that many!). 

We had no idea what to expect, but we were very pleasantly surprised. Initially stood in the middle of the room feeling clueless, but in no time at all got stuck right in figuring it all out!

The theme was brilliant, fantastic set. We got completely stuck on a couple of red herrings, and massively overthought one puzzle which turned out to be very basic. The puzzles were just the right level for first timers in my opinion as we got out with around 6 minutes to spare. 

Fantastic experience and it got me hooked!

This room is 'ok' in the grand scheme of things, but some parts of it are just absolutely unnecessarily difficult, and you don't need to solve everything before you can escape.

The setting was fantastic but unfortunately this was not matched by the quality of the puzzles. We had multiple instances where we had “solved” the puzzle but spent minutes trying various ways of converting the answer into numbers for a combination lock. Quite frustrating solving experience which meant we didn’t get a huge amount of satisfaction when we finally solved the room. Our host was unenthusiastic and there was almost no backstory or motivation given which set our experience off on the wrong foot. 

A Sherlock inspired room with a nice set and some clever puzzles.  We overthought one puzzle which ended up being a bit frustrating, and there was one puzzle where the connection between the clue and the lock was not very clear.  But otherwise a pretty straightforward, entertaining room.  Jess was a lovely host, who passed the critical "will she wear the prop hat" test with flying colours.  Worth a try!