Salisbury Escape Rooms: A Case of Murder and Marigolds

We followed up our Reading trip with a visit to one of our local escape rooms, we were met by our host Maisie who was very friendly and explained the ins and outs well, she got into character just before we started to get us prepared for the tasks at hand.

The story was good and the way the rooms are decorated and designed fit well into the gardening theme, there are a good amount of puzzles, a good mix of mental and skill games and a decent amount of padlocks but, not too many and not one after another that would have felt like overkill. 

 We enjoyed the fact that finding something in one room may or may not have use in the same room but would be essential in one of the next rooms. 

Overall we enjoyed the room and made our escape with seconds remaining, we asked for help twice, one occasion that was totally unnecessary but sometimes you miss things that are in plain sight due to the clock ticking down. We rated it as normal difficulty but some groups may find it a little more challenging, especially first time players or players new to escape rooms.

Having a timer in the room was good, we knew kind of where we were at and whther or not we were falling behind or ahead of the game. 

One thing that we could say as a small negative point, would be that there are so many pictures and posters on the walls that we found ourselves studying them meticulously as it felt that they had to be involved in solving some of the puzzles however, they're mostly just for aesthetics and whilst they fitted the theme. It caused us to lose a fair bit of time looking for plant names and uses on them that would help us move forward but then every room we've played and I'm sure moany other groups have done the same here and in previous escape rooms.

We'd like to thank Maisie for being a good host and for creating this game, our advice for those thinking of playing would be, come to sunny Salisbury and try to help solve a murder!! 

This is a great little independently-owned escape room. It only has one room at the time of writing, and seems to have been around for a while with different rooms but I believe it's recently gone through a remodel and change of ownership. Maisie was our host, as well as the current owner, and she is clearly passionate and knowledgeable about escape rooms.

Puzzles were varied and logical. Only thing preventing a full 5 stars was one physical puzzle that was a little awkward - but still totally doable, and a couple of puzzles that had holdover elements from puzzles that had been removed previously - which could be distracting to a less experienced or less focused team.

It was quite difficult - we only had 5 minutes left when we got out, despite (at least as far as I recall), not really taking any time to pause and it felt like we were constantly making progress and not wasting any time. But there were only two of us, we didn't ask for any clues, and maybe there is more room for improvement in our skills than we think!

Value is ok for 2 players (£30) each, which I was happy to pay - but it's good value with larger teams (about £20-16 per player, depending on how many players).