Escape the Review

Thrice a TERPECA winner, Going Underground has a firmly established reputation as the top game in Austria. It’s at a separate location to the other Crime Runners rooms, and where the others form a single story, Going Underground seems to be a stand-alone narrative. In this one, you’re a team sent to investigate unexpected seismic activity and a possible bomb left over from World War 2, somewhere beneath the city.

This is a game that starts strong and just keeps going from one cool moment...

Ask for Budapest game recommendations and you’ll mostly get the usual list of well-known classics that have been played and loved for years. Ask for recommendations for Budapest rooms that have opened more recently, and Aroom is likely to get mentioned. We squeezed in a trip to them on impulse before leaving Budapest, and picked Deadland from their line-up mostly at random.

It’s an apocalyptic zombie theme, where you (plucky human survivors) are stranded in zombie-infested ruins and need to mak...

Downtown Budapest is packed with escape rooms; even with the most intense schedule you could play games for a week without needing to leave the centre. So it’s pretty impressive that Pirate Cave has survived and thrived for close to a decade despite being several metro stops out to the east.

The venue is deep within an industrial park, and has just the one eponymous game. It immediately gave me a good impression thanks to the owner, who was solicitous and clearly passionate about his room. I su...

Neverland’s underground venue gives an otherworldly impression: it seemed like we’d found a whole complex of vividly coloured chambers, a sprawling space leading off to one escape room after another. They do indeed have an impressive number of escape games, but also a bar, a restaurant area and even a karaoke option. On another visit I might plan to spend time here before or after any games.

You're entering ancient Aztec tombs in search of a magical healing crystal. This is the kind of game tha...

Long a fixture on the Budapest scene, E-Exit has several often-recommended rooms, but Secret Subway is the newest and longest, at 75 minutes, as well as the one that tends to get the highest plaudits. In it you're delving into a forgotten inventor's hideaway and investigating the writings and machines he's left behind. It has a classic steampunk aesthetic with brass pipes and gothic Da Vinci diagrams; the website suggests bringing a large team, but we found it fine with two, and probably more co...

Budapest’s reputation as an early centre for the escape room explosion is legendary; and White Mission is among the city’s most famous games. That’s due to the game’s concept, startlingly original when first created, that instead of a room filled with clues and items the players would find themselves in what seemed to be a nearly empty white room.

Many years later, the novelty of that idea has faded, but it’s still a nice concept. The game certainly shows its age, not just in the simple decor a...

The third game from Enigma Quests opened shortly before the pandemic, with the result that I was still thinking of it as a new game and was surprised to realise that it’s already over two years old. The scenario here is that you’re trying to defuse a submarine’s nuclear missile before it’s launched.

For this game there’s not a padlock in sight; everything is based around physical and electronic manipulation, with control panels and wires and switches and screens and valves. And as an extra comp...

MoviESCAPE’s boast is that for extra realism and immersion, they use items taken from real haunted houses and movie sets as part of their room decor; with the magic school game we played, that was presumably less of the former and more of the latter. They’re located some way outside Stockport itself, which seems to give them the luxury of space: their expansive lobby is an immediate plus, a bar area which would be quite comfortable to spend time in before or after a game.

In this Harry Potter i...

I know close to nothing about the Mods, and certainly don’t have any nostalgic resonance with the sub-culture. Even so, the exuberance and ubiquity of the Sixties patterns and designs were irresistible.

If you’re not familiar with the history, the Mods and the Rockers were rival gangs that clashed violently in Brighton on more than one occasion. In Modrophenia, you’re investigating the death of a fellow Mod, and need to construct a timeline of his movements leading up to his murder. In practice...

Loot The Lanes should need little introduction. It's occupied the #1 slot on this site's rankings of UK games for far longer than any of its rivals, and it was the highest ranked UK game in the TERPECA awards in 2019, 2020 and 2021. As a result it's been top of my list of games to play for an unconscionably long time, with a visit delayed by a combination of the pandemic and the fiddly logistics of organising a group for a Brighton trip. It officially requires at least four players, but is playa...

The latest game from Pier Pressure is the first to be based at their Paradox Parlour shop, which had a highly tempting array of goodies for sale and which also offers their museum of illusions - which we didn’t have a chance to explore this time but which I certainly hope to see in a future visit.

All Pier Pressure’s games are hosted in costume and in character, and we were met by one of the most enthusiastically piratical hosts I’ve yet encountered. Pier Pressure are well known for the high qu...

I liked Deckscape's original game quite a bit, when I first tried it, but their following games have often struggled to win me over; so having heard that El Dorado was one of the weaker games in the series, I didn't have high hopes for it. Perhaps with the benefit of those low expectations, I ended up finding it surprisingly enjoyable.

As with their other games, El Dorado is a small box of cards, which you work through in a semi-linear way, with some cards being puzzles that you must solve to g...

Few games exude quality the way The Emerald Flame does. Post Curious have had the highest of reputations since their original box game The Tale of Ord, and this follow up does nothing to undermine that.

Although shorter than its predecessor, The Emerald Flame still comes in at 6-9 hours gameplay, consisting of three chapters, each of which takes 2-3 hours. This is not a game to race through though, it's one to be savoured and enjoyed. The large box contains three sturdy white envelopes, plus a ...

Barcelona boasts far more than its fair share of world class games, but La Mina was still notable for having won TERPECA awards in both 2019 and 2020, giving it a pedigree that’s hard to match.

At 90 mins this is a bumper size game. In fact, it’s pretty packed even compared to other 90 mins games. After playing a room, I normally make notes on the puzzles it contained, since otherwise the details fade rapidly from my mind. With La Mina that was a challenge - because it contained so. many. pu...