London, Sep 2021
In real life, being kidnapped by a criminal and left shackled in a box next to a ticking bomb would I suppose be a thoroughly unpleasant experience – so in that sense I guess you could say that Komnata have nailed the realism here.
Sherlocked is a 45 minute concept game for two players. (You can book for four, but in that case you play as two separate pairs, in the two copies of the game.) Each player is handcuffed and locked in one of two adjoining ‘coffins’ – though fortunately these padded boxes are quite a bit more spacious than an actual coffin, giving you some room to wriggle around.
Expect to stay handcuffed more or less the whole game. As veteran players may know, metal handcuffs rapidly get painful on the wrists after a while, so it’s a big point in Komnata‘s favour that they provided us with cloth wrist protectors to wear. These mostly fell off in the first few minutes, so didn’t actually make much difference, but the thought was nice. In the event, I was sufficiently sick of the cuffs after twenty minutes that I squeezed one hand out, one side being just loose enough to make that an option.
As you’d expect, the game revolves around communication between the two players. With the venue being in Vauxhall railway arches, the intermittent sound of overhead trains sometimes made that trickier; plus at times I could hear the voices of other teams playing Hakaina next door more loudly than I could my teammate in the coffin next to me. That gets easier a little way into the game, but in a way that requires ongoing active physical effort from both players.
Communication puzzles reliably take longer for players to solve, and solving is also slower when restrained or in the dark. So it’s no surprise that Sherlocked has a small number of puzzles. Less expected was that these were pretty uniformly weak. There was also a curious reliance on electronic devices such as tablets, which have to be used with care in an escape room, since they come with so much built-in functionality that can become a heap of red herrings if not thoroughly locked down. And the concluding puzzle seemed to make no sense at all even after our host had explained it.
This all added up to a game with very little flow, that frequently had one player blocked and waiting on the other, where by nature of the design there was very little to do or even look at. Partway through I was giving serious consideration to just having a nap until the time ran out.
Obviously, anyone booking Sherlocked should be expecting darkness, confinement, and a certain amount of discomfort, and will likely have chosen the game precisely because of that. I’d still argue they should allow players to escape their cuffs at a much earlier stage. But more importantly, it’s possible to put players in fairly extreme confinement situations, where escape requires communication or physical manipulation tasks that are interesting and logical, challenging and rewarding. This managed to be none of those. We booked it with a 70% off discount code and it was still nowhere close to being worth the price. If you’re visiting Komnata, pick a different one of their games; if you like Sherlocked’s concept, there are a small number of other games in the country that do something similar, and I highly recommend doing one of those instead. 