Escapism Chester: Amphitheatre

We liked the teams working together, but overall puzzles weren't great. 

Love the original theme for this room. Playing off the history of Chester. However the room itself felt quite cheaply made and wasn't that immersive. Even though it was a 5/5 difficulty rated room on their website we found it quite easy and breezed through a lot of the puzzles. Some felt like they didn't really fit the theme/narrative of the room but the others worked well and seemed to flow well enough. Had a great time and managed to escape in a decent time as well.

Two of my favourite things in escape rooms are historical themes and locally-inspired themes, so a room inspired by Chester’s Roman Amphitheatre sounded right in my wheelhouse.

The actual room, however, was a big disappointment. The decor was all very cheap-looking and made only a very superficial effort to look like the under-arena cells it purported to be. Although I’m not a big fan of unnecessary darkness in escape rooms, I think a bit of flickering-torches-in-the-shadows atmospheric lack-of-lighting would have helped here.

The puzzles were mostly based around very anachronistic padlocks, and there wasn’t much of a story. Probably the biggest disappointment though, came at the end - there wasn’t an obvious ‘you’ve done it!’ moment, and when we opened the door there wasn’t anyone there to meet us. The problem was that the people in the neighbouring room had finished just before us, and there was only one GM between the two rooms.

Having said all that, if you go in expecting a bunch of puzzles without being worried about immersion, then this room is fun enough (the two newbies we had with us certainly enjoyed it).

Second Room, First Failure 😖

I’m in the process of moving my reviews from my blog to this site, where I hope more people will read them! My visit to this room was a couple of years ago, hence its shortness.

Story

We were prisoners locked up and waiting to be thrown into the gladiators’ arena, unless we could escape before the guards return.

Puzzles

We barely got through half of them, which was disappointing. Some of the props and clues were worn-down, making them difficult to use.

Mise-en-scène

In the first half, I felt immersed by the cell’s walls, metal bars and the sound of gladiators’ swords clashing above. After this, some of the props looked cheap and bargain-shop-ish, taking me out of the game.

Final Comments

Attempting a five-star room was maybe too much for a group who had only done one before, but I feel like we were left without clues a few too many times.

We escaped this room in February 2018 just my partner and I and escaped in a bit more than 30 minutes. The room was a bit easy for us and there were not that many puzzles. We may have cheated in the first area of the escape room without realising, which probably indicates that the puzzle was not correctly built as we managed to skip it by mistake. Good for a team of 2!

#23

A fun room with an enjoyable theme, we don’t normally like SPOILERS— being split up at the start, but it didn’t last too long. Possibly because one of the puzzles hadn’t been reset properly, this didn’t bother us too much though. A few tired props here and there, and the monitor stuck out like a sore thumb against the set decoration, but it was still good fun, and had a few quirks.

I loved the premise of this game and it started off in a different way which make it even more exciting.

I can imagine it would be a challenge for a bigger group.