Breakout Cardiff: Cursed Carnival

Played this with a newbie and thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere and puzzles. Kept us on our toes throughout and our own stupid mistakes made us take longer. 

Played this room as a group of 3, for a three star rated room it’s definitely one of the harder ones. Plenty of puzzles to solve the room decorations matched the theme perfectly

Great introduction game - Easy for experienced players.

Nothing special, but another great starter game from BOL.

The first room we ever did

Really enjoyed the production on this one.

Was fairly easy which in hindsight was good as our first room.

Was not scary really though

This room has a great carnival theme, with a slighty creepy undertone (mostly having to carry a creepy doll around with you). 

The space seems big as you are constantly moving into new sections of the game. The puzzles aren't particuarly hard but are mostly themed well to the room. 

The room was enjoyable and had enough to do that it was satisfying to work through and complete. It is definitely suitable to beginner players.

A fun, slightly eerie experience. The carnival theme is great throughout. The decor and props work well to create  a good atmosphere. I was expecting it to be a bit scary and jumpy, but it wasn't.

There are some nice games in here and it kept the 2 of us entertained. A fairly easy game though, larger experienced teams may finish it quite quickly. 

We played forgotten to not long after it opened to the public, and the room itself looks really great. However it felt like there was a few clunky puzzles in here that left us scratching our heads and needed explaining.

Fun room which will probably be great for beginners. Its quite linier in its flow without much walking backwards and forwards so always feels like you're progressing. The carnival theme is kept well throughout and it has a nice mix of puzzles that everyone can get involved in. The name "cursed" carnival and the description make it sound quite scary but it's not at all and would be suitable for families to enjoy. We had fun in this room and would recommend it.

#7

A fun experience here, they went all out with the decoration and it looks great, wasn’t too difficult so I would recommend this before tackling something like Forsaken or Excalibur. Don’t be fooled by the ‘Cursed’ moniker though,  this is family friendly.  Would recommend if you’re heading to Breakout.

We escaped the Cursed Carnival at Breakout Liverpool back in 2016 with Team Raging Clue. We picked this room as it was the easiest one according to the stats, so we can slowly and surely build up to the most difficult rooms.   The layout of the room itself wasn’t that bad, with new surprises at each corner and a nice carnival soundtrack. We had a good fair amount of laughs throughout our 44 minutes of game but I regret few things: – the lights being maybe too bright indulging a bit the atmosphere of what could have been a really creepy carnival room; – some puzzles were a bit far-fetched (and even after sleeping on it, we still haven’t understand their logic). – and finally, the ending was a bit of a let down: the door opened by itself before we finished completing the last puzzle… !   We first thought someone opened it by mistake as we were still trying to sort out our last puzzle!

Do not be fooled. This room is rated 3/5 difficulty and posed as one of the easiest games on their website, however it was not easy by any stretch of the imagine. This room has LOADS to do.

Some rooms have a great mixture of math puzzles log puzzles, obvservation, physical puzzles etc. Cursed Carnival is very VERY padlock heavy (which we dont actually mind) and involves a lot of searching, (something else we dont actually mind)

Its greatly on theme throughout and the puzzles are perfectly logical. This actually turned out to be our favourite room of 4 that we played in one day (disturbed, dark magic and excalibur being the others)

Some people may be put off by the theme, however its purely there for theming and storyline, and not scary at all so perfectly suitable for all

Cursed? More Like Cute...

I went for this room as I like a spooky challenge. Little did I know...

Story

Return to the cursed carnival to rescue a doll possessed by a girl...or is that a girl trapped in a doll? Even so, our Game Operator said our mission was to find said doll to sell it on the black market. Who knows.

Puzzles

Straightforward, standard solving with the odd carnival game or two thrown in.

Mise-en-scène

There were plenty of circus-themed articles, but none had been given the horror twist I expected. The Hall of Mirrors was a highlight.

Final Comments

We bossed it as a team of two. No one else is needed. In relation to 'Cursed', the name is very inaccurate, but as for 'Carnival', it's spot on. The difficulty rating should be two stars, not three. Overall, a chilled and amusing room.