Chesterfield Escape Rooms: Rob The Bank

This is a fun room with some great hosting (our host committed to it!) - I think we managed to stress ourselves out quite a lot and our puzzle solving suffered 😅 it’s worth just getting into the theme and having fun with this one! 

What a blast! This was a fun, interactive spin on the bank heist trope, sandwiched with a cracking beginning and end. There's a degree of acting involved but nothing too tricky and nothing that takes away from the impetus of the game. This is an incredibly immersive game and we found ourselves really getting into role. Top marks for enjoyment!

This room was buckets and buckets of fun! Of all the games we had booked in for at Chesterfield, this one was the one we were most nervous for after reading some of the other reviews on here that mentioned the gameplay being a lot more acting than solving puzzles. However, we had an absolute blast in this room. We laughed pretty much the entire hour and the acting segments added to the whole experience rather than detracting from it. We could tell that with some of the acting parts, the GM was trying to slow us down as clearly we were doing rather well for time (the puzzles themselves were relatively easy), but as we were having so much fun and still escaped with a respectable time, we didn't really mind! Super cool beginning to the room and a thrilling end, with a bunch of fun puzzles and exciting moments in the middle. We have done a few 'robbery' rooms before with heists being quite a common room theme, but this one was by far the most impressive, unique and enjoyable.

You are a group of bank robbers breaking into a bank that’s owned by a rival criminal gang (so no hard feelings).

There were a lot of strong points to this game. The décor was of good quality, with some nice touches, particularly near the start of the room. The puzzle mechanisms were also kept strongly on theme; some of Chesterfield Escape Rooms’ other games tend to be very padlock heavy, but here much more thought has gone into the mechanisms, and any padlocks fitted within context.

One point to note is that Chesterfield Escape Rooms have a philosophy of including quite a lot of redundant information that plausibly could provide a solution to the clues. Ostensibly this is done to create authenticity. For larger groups, this is unlikely to be a major issue, since by dividing and conquering these can be relatively quickly eliminated. For smaller groups, it can be frustrating!

The thing however that makes this game the most fun is that after a fairly standard start, it becomes very playful. There are a number of interactive elements with the “outside world” which are highly silly and entertaining, and a certain amount of (non-scary) live action complete with some well known theme music which made us laugh. There’s also a nice “extra win” condition that adds a different form of enjoyment. Good for most groups other than very young children.