Houdini’s Escape Room Experience Birmingham: Escape From Titanic

Let me start by saying that this wasn't even the room we were supposed to be doing. We had booked Hexmore, and on arrival we were told that Hexmore was so broken that he didn't want us doing it and he asked if we were happy to do Titanic instead. So I was already annoyed that they didn't contact me in advance and ask us to change (what would they have done if we had already done Titanic before?) we were taking some friends for their first ever escape room and wanted something easy for them. It's a good job we were experienced enough to help them through it; because this room was a mess! 

The GM was completely unenthusiastic and unhelpful. He led us to the room where we were given no briefing whatsoever. No health and safety, no 'these are the sort of locks you might find', nothing. Just told us that because of the mixup he would give us 90 minutes and sent us in. There is a lot of GM intervention in this room so if you get an uninterested GM like we did then this room is not going to be as enjoyable. 

HERE IS YOUR SPOILER WARNING! The rest of this review does contain some spoilers.

The first area was in my opinion the best room, theming was great and there seemed to be lots of puzzles for everyone to solve. However... on inspection, the puzzles were badly damaged. Clues were stuck to elements using stickers, half of which were missing and you could just about see where they had tried to carve the missing clues back onto the objects, but it was very hard to see and very clearly not intentional - just broken. Here's the one that got me the most agitated -  the numbers for one of the clues had been stuck on/scrawled in the wrong order! So the solution was spelled wrong, very confusing. But it wasn't just the clues that were broken, one of the key puzzle elements that we collected instantly fell apart in our hands so we had to keep putting it back together until we found out where it needed to go.

There are also a lot of red herrings throughout this room which may well have just been old broken puzzles that they didn't bother to fix.

Moving on to the next area involved some crawling (there was no prior warning on booking that there would be any physical activity). However, we quite liked it and it fit with the theme. 

The next area had such potential, this was the room where they could have absolutely gone to town on the theming but it was quite the opposite. Very minimal and very cheap. They had large black panels on the wall in place of windows. They could have at least put some artwork there that made it look like you were looking out of a window, not just solid black panels. What few elements there were in here were just more red herrings and we were so convinced they should be puzzles that the GM just used the microphone to tell us exactly where to find a hidden clue (which we hadn't asked for and was so direct it was very aggravating).

In the next area were were then tasked with the typical morse code puzzle, but the GM didn't even let me finish putting in all of the information before he activated the next step, so it was rather pointless. 

To end it all off, the finale was rather weak. The premise was cool but the budget fir theming must have run out as they seemed to give up on it. This section of the game was aimed at 4 players so may have been tricky with less, especially as the elements didn't stay put without you holding them. The game then just sort of finished and we were left wondering if we were meant to just press the switch to exit or wait for the GM to eventually turn up and let us out. 

Overall, I was left very disappointed by a game that I had heard good things about. The room seems dated, it's broken, it's rather illogical in its puzzles and red herrings at times and the GM was a let down. The whole location (not just Titanic) seemed very unprofessional and in need of some serious work. The newcomers enjoyed it, but as enthusiasts were would definitely not recommend it.