LevelUp Escapes: Mission: Abducted

However, this room unfortunately had me annoyed from the very beginning. The rooms are intentionally dark to begin with, which is fine. But this meant that I was feeling around, poking and prodding everything to work out what we should be doing. Until i came across something sticky... Luckily we brightened the room up pretty quickly, only for me to discover that the sticky feeling was wet paint. Bright green, wet paint. The colour had come off the top of one of the puzzle elements and instead of just letting us work out what the missing colour was (which would have been easy enough), they covered it in wet paint. I got very lucky that i didn't wipe it all over myself and had a tissue on hand to clean up a bit (as there are no toilets in the venue, only the shopping centre, which would have taken time away from the room).

Moving on from that sticky situation.... there was a really great balance between the 2 starting zones, meaning there was lots of back and forth between the mini-teams and not too much waiting around for the others. We were out of there pretty quickly and reunited to find LOTS more puzzles to complete.

The main bulk of the room is almost entirely non-linear, so we were in our element with the divide and conquer approach. There is a great variety of puzzles in here and a mixture of combination locks, keys and maglocks.

We managed to skip a few steps in here and soon realised that we needed to go back and complete everything. You will need to do everything, so there is a lot to do.

This is where we encountered issue number 2. There is a puzzle where we found a solution which perfectly met the criteria and it didn't work. We got stuck here for quite a while trying different solutions, coming up with multiple different solutions and nothing working, until finally one did. We asked the GM at the end of the game why the other solutions didn't work and she couldn't give us a reason. The reasoning she gave for the correct solution, also matched the first answer we gave but it didn't work. They clearly haven't accounted for there being any other solutions, which there are. So this was rather annoying.

Getting into the last room felt a bit janky and I wasn't sure we were even doing it right, as it was quite a stretch at times and felt like we were taking shortcuts, but apparently, it was correct. All of which was done whilst being blasted with really loud music so we couldn't hear each other very well. 

Overall, it was fun, and the puzzles were good, but much like the first room we did, it needs fine-tuning and some better thought putting into certain elements.

Edit...

LevelUp have since been in touch and provided a detailed explanation on the solution to the puzzle I mentioned. Their reasoning does now make sense, however, it certainly didn't at the time. Maybe it just didn't click for our team, but personally, I would just swap it out for a clearer puzzle.

While a space theme wouldn't be our first choice of theme, this super level of challenge definitely would; tricky, we would imagine, for beginners due to the volume of puzzles and to the tricky split start, this really got us scratching our heads at times.

The split start is a decent chunk of the game as opposed to a gimmick at the beginning and there's a bit of work to be done before you can communicate effectively enough to rejoin each other in the main area of gameplay. There was another decent chunk of puzzles - with one logic puzzle being particularly good - before the game finale, which was another lovely physical challenge. 

Overall, it's a lovely game with plenty going on.

We had a fantastic time playing Mission: Abducted a tough challenge, with communication being key. Fantastic Hosting too from the team here.

Had great fun during this room. We played as a two and had decent time left. I would imagine it’s tricky for an inexperienced small team so bare that in mind when you book. All the puzzles were well themed and had a nice balance between padlocks and Maglocks. Everything made perfect sense and we had a good laugh as we played. 

They do not lie when they say you need 4 and above, it is a must. But such a good game with lots of great puzzles!

This game is definitely suited to a larger team! Would recommend three people at an absolute minimum! 

This is a tough room - but has a very rewarding end. 

There’s lots of unique ideas we saw in this game that we loved and really got us thinking, it’s nice to play something different, we like the idea of a new challenge each time. With out giving much away we really enjoyed the first room’s something we had never seen before and really got us working together. 

Our host Nathan was fab, very enthusiastic and clearly knew the game well and balanced our clues to ensure we got out just in time.