Escape Live Birmingham: Peaky Blinders: The Raid

As Peaky Blinders fans we were eager to try this room. 

We knew it was an older room so the set being a little worn was to be expected, but it completely ruined one of the final puzzles in the room. The objects we needed had been so worn down that the writing on them was really difficult to read. We’re quite experienced players so had flown through the room up until this point, but finally got stuck. We’d got the basic idea of what we needed to do, but the information needed was so worn away that we disregarded it as being the answer as we thought that surely it wouldn’t have been accesible to those with slightly poorer eyesight. We puzzled for a good 5-10 minutes and finally asked for the first clue of our game, to which we received a response from the GM telling us we were doing too well so we had to wait 5 minutes to ask for help.

So we stood and waited for 5 minutes, which lowered our enthusiasm and excitement and ruined the flow. I understand that if a team are doing well you don’t want them to ask for a hint if they don’t need it, but it wasn’t a case of us not understanding the puzzle, and it had been a fair deal of time on this compared to the rest of our room. We had a discussion about whether to ask for a hint as we don’t usually like to, but we could feel ourselves losing enthusiasm and getting frustrated.

The first 80% of our game was great, we were enjoying working as a team, solving puzzles, and loved the immersion of it being a peaky blinders room! It’s a shame that this final part put a dampener on our escape experience. 

I really enjoyed this room. And it was my first experience with Escape Live Birmingham and I will definitely be going back and recommend them to others. 

It's not often everything in a room functions as it should do, but this did (maybe because it's was so new at time of playing). 

I love that it's an official Peakys room, so that allows them to do certain things other rooms can't. 

It was, I would say, of the 10 or so rooms I've done, the easiest room I've ever played, but I think given the theme that's a positive. I think fans of the show will be attracted to this room and get a good taste for Escape Rooms, whereas a really tough experience might put them off future games. I think this is a great game for anyone just starting out. 

The props and set were worn and broken.

Clues by the host were vague and not in a mysterious way. 

It felt like you had to make a lot of assumptions for things to work. 

The host asked for feedback and we told her that the room was really worn and needed updating. She literally could not care for this and ushered us out. 

Nice little game, little different to what we have played before where we had to collect certain items to destroy.  Puzzles were quite simple but flowed nicely. Nice room even if not a Peaky Blinders fan.