PurpleB

Another great concept, well executed from Deadlocked.

Great concept for a room with some really nice touches thrown in.  Clever and innovative puzzles.  Fantastic GM too.

I'm slightly surprised this is getting such good reviews as we felt let down by such an expensive boxed game.

Starting with the good stuff - the production value is excellent.  I haven't experience a play-at-home game that matches this one although that is reflected in the price.  The story was good although the videos were a little long and we lost interest during them a bit. There were a couple of really nice puzzles too, although overall the puzzles were a tad mediocre and a couple were poor.  In my book a good puzzle should be challenging but once you figure it out you should be sure you have the right answer. For several of these puzzles we had the right answer but weren't confident we did or we found their wording ambigous leading to multiple possible solutions.

The real flaw in this game was the answer system.  You have to enter a combination which involves the answers to multiple puzzles at once and if it's wrong you don't have any idea which bit is wrong. When that is coupled with poor puzzles with ambiguous wording you end up in a very frustrating position where you have too many combinations to feasibly try.  This problem is compounded by the hint system which we found basically useless.  When we couldn't find the right combination of answers we looked to the hints to help narrow things down but they only told us things we already knew and didn't remove any of the ambiguity we were seeing.

I'm afraid we found the middle video unpleasant to watch (do not play this with children) to such an extent that we basically skipped that puzzle.

The other frustrating thing is that you can only play it once.  As the game was so expensive we tried very hard to play it in such a way that we might be able to give it to friends to play afterwards. But that was basically impossible. £40 is a lot for a single-play box game.

Excellent value for money with effectively 3 games in 1!  I really liked the concept behind this and thought it was done very well.  However, this doesn't get a better star rating because it was let down a bit by some of the puzzle content.  The first chapter was so easy with such basic puzzles that we nearly didn't bother with 2 & 3.  I'm glad we did because things improved a bit from there with some really nice computer-based puzzles. Most of the printed puzzles were rather unoriginal but fine, however wer found the GoogleMaps section very tedious.

This was my first time trying a VR experience and it was better than I expected. ClueQuests setup has two teams of 2 playing in the same room. We were lucky as the other team who'd booked the same timeslot as us didn't show up but I imagine it would be really distracting to hear another team talking in the background while you were playing. You were supposed to only hear your teammate talk through headphones but that didn't work at all.

The puzzles were all rather straightforward so this wasn't a particularly challenging experience but I enjoyed the novelty factor of the VR.  Worth trying once, but I probably wouldn't sign up for another.

A good set and some interesting puzzles.  However this room suffers from having a "breakable" puzzle (that is puzzles where your attempts to do them can render them impossible to complete).  I always feel this is bad puzzle design for an escape room.

There was some good stuff in this room but it was let down by a couple of puzzles.  One branch of puzzles lead simply to a clue for a different puzzle which we'd solved ages ago without needing the clue and so was completely pointless.  The GM also seemed to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder and spent a large amount of time telling us how great his room was and how rubbish some of the competition were.  This spoiled the experience a bit.

Another good room from Lucardo.  My least favourite of all their rooms but that's just because I enjoyed the others so much.  I wasn't a fan of a couple of the puzzles as I felt there were obvious ways to make them better. But still a lot of fun.

A very enjoyable room.

Great room: awesome set, well-themed puzzles, and it all ties together really nicely.

Most of the time when GMs come out before the game in costume and start some rehearsed pre-game bit, I inwardly cringe and try and hide behind my teammates until it's over.  But the GMs at Rawtenstall demostrate how this type of thing can work really well.  We played all their games and all the GMs were excellent but the one we had for Safe House was particularly good.

The room itself was great, with some nice surprises.  I got frustrated a couple of times with the puzzles but that was my own fault for missing things!

A great set and some interesting well-themed puzzles.  The game was let down a bit by the last puzzle though, which was lacking proper constraints and required you to make assumptions which didn't fit with the story.

A decent room but a couple of puzzles had multiple interpretations which isn't itself a problem but, when coupled with no indication of which puzzle belongs to which lock, leaves you having to try so many different combinations it becomes a bit tedious.

Original room with a really interesting theme.

Really enjoyable room with some interesting puzzles and technology.

An enjoyable room.  A couple of the puzzles were a tad weak in my opinion but good variety and production value.

A little tired looking and a bit cramped but a decent room.

An enjoyable room. One of the only places I've been made to sign a waiver before I played, which seemed a little unnecessary.  I don't really know why they needed to ask us all our age.

Great set, great puzzles. I've heard criticisms that the second room could be a bit cramped for large teams, but we did it as a full team of 6 and managed fine.

Another great room from co-decode. A really good mix of puzzles which was great for our group of varying experience players. Another room which has a sliding win condition so that beginners and enthusiasts can both enjoy the room to the max.

The Curse of the Golden Lion demonstrates that you don't have to spend a fortune on a set in order to make an outstanding escape room. Some great puzzles and a really nice touch of the optional extra puzzles so the room can be a challenge for beginners and enthusiasts alike.

An amazing room.  A couple of the items were a bit worse for wear when we played and broke during play which stops this getting the full 5*.  I also wish there wasn't quite so much content in the room.  Although we did escape, we had to parallelise a lot in order to do so and it meant there were large chunks of the room I never saw!

Having commented that the GM in Outfitters hinted us a bit too readily, the GM for Dodge City was spot on and one of the best hinters our group has had.  We needed only a couple of tiny hints to complete the room and the GM let us figure stuff out for ourselves as much as he could.

The GM hinted us a bit too quickly in this room and we wished we could have had a little more time to work on the puzzles ourselves.  But another outstanding room from Tulleys.

What can I say, Tulleys are just awesome.

I had a lot of fun in this room. The puzzles were fairly ordinary but I enjoyed the physical elements of the room as they were a bit different. I think I'd get fed up if that type of thing cropped up in every room but as I one off novelty it worked for me.

This game didn't quite live up to its reviews for me.  Don't get me wrong, it was still excellent but I was expecting it to be one of the best and it wasn't.

We were kept waiting standing outside for ages before our game started which wasn't the best customer service to kick things off. But things improved once we got inside.  The game has lots of great puzzles but quite a few rely heavily on technology and were a bit of a let down when they didn't quite work properly and left me feeling rather frustrated.

The hint system in this room gets a special thumbs up mention :-).

My favourite of the Houdini's rooms. The set was amazing, the puzzles were fantastic and the GM was one of the best. Love this room.

A very impressive set but it did leave me feeling a bit cramped at times.  There were some fantastic puzzles in this but also a couple that I found a little laborious.  I wasn't sure why they needed to make it a 90 min game.  We escaped in around 50 mins and if they just removed some of the more tedious aspects of some of the puzzles then this would be a great 1 hour game.

As we were a group of 2 enthusiasts, the very nice owners let us play Spellbound even though it normally has a minimum of 4 players. I can see why it would be a great game for a large group as there are lots of highly paralisable puzzles. Even though we didn't do it with an ideal number of players it was still a really enjoyable game.

After playing Utopia and Dystopia this game seemed rather easy and not quite as good as the others.  A great game for escape room beginners.

Not quite as good as Utopia in my opinion.  One or two of the puzzles required a bit of an unreasonable stretch.  But still an excellent room.

The production value in this game is superb. We played it as a 2 and it worked really well. I also loved the ending :-).

Some good stuff in this room but it was a tad small with all play happening in the starting room.  One of the puzzles was slightly broken in that we managed to get the answer to it before we were meant to meaning we missed a whole chunk of the room. The owner said he was going to adapt it after we'd played it so future teams didn't have the same thing happen.

This is the closest I've come to not finishing a room - we escaped with zero seconds remaining on the clock!  We were only a team of 2 and this room could easily keep a team of 4-6 busy so a great choice for larger groups (or smaller groups up for a challenge!).