Edinburgh, Apr 2017
With Distillery, Locked In continue their exceptional standard of theming and props. Here the equipment used for the room comes courtesy of an actual gin distillery elsewhere in the building, and it looks fantastic.
The largest and most impressive items in the game are sadly purely decorative, though clearly marked as such. A couple of surfaces are marked as suitable for writing notes on with a highlighter, which is a great alternative to a whiteboard or pen and paper.
A good portion of this game revolves around unlocking padlocks, often from clues that are arbitrary in the sense that they don’t make sense in the setting except as puzzles for the players to tackle. That’s par for the course for most escape games, so it’s nice when – as at several points here – an effort has been made to include clues and puzzles that fit naturally into the logic of the story, and which make sense as found objects.
I felt that a couple of the tasks were a little flawed, with one clue being difficult to make out even when we knew it was there, and another that could be input multiple ways into a lock type that was both error-prone to use and which used an auto lock-out for repeated wrong attempts (though only a short one).
Players have two aims in the game, with a main path and a sub-task that could be considered optional, though I wouldn’t expect many teams to skip it.
The climax of the game is excellent. There was a technical issue that meant the final element wasn’t working correctly for us, though the operators covered for it pretty smoothly, and in fact that meant we got away with a silly error that might otherwise have penalised us. It’s a solid room that’s lifted by the location and the authenticity of the props. 
