Ben Franklin

We've probably completed about a dozen escape rooms so far, and this might be the best. It's hard to talk about it without spoiling it, but this room is tons of fun. Great puzzles, story, production design and surprises. We hired 2 rooms and we each had slightly different experiences (although I do know our other friends had some technical issues with theirs).

Highly recommend this room to anyone looking for an hour of fun with friends.

(NOTE: We did the 'Impossibly Difficult' level and found it fine)

A great time was had by all! Really enjoyed our experience and the team did a lovely job of looking after us all. Would definitely return to try another room.

Heist Plan is fairly average room, full of lock and key style puzzles. Having done a few newer rooms that no longer use this style of puzzle (or use it minimally), it feels a little dated (even if it might be argued it’s partly thematic for the story of room). Finding keys and unlocking boxes just isn’t super fun, and quickly got repetitive.

The puzzles in this room were pretty simple overall and I’d recommend a group of 2-3 max, in order to get the most out of it. We had 6 people and it was too many as there wasn’t enough for us to do, without at least half of us standing around at any given time.

Some of puzzles in this room are a bit more physical, with a chain related puzzle being the highlight. Without giving away any spoilers, one other puzzle - easily the worst part of the room - had us controlling something which was absolutely NOT fun. Three different people tried it in our group, and at certain points we had to improvise in order to ‘fix’ the puzzle so we could continue playing it. It was a good idea on paper, but very poorly executed. Seemingly the main functioning item of the puzzle wasn’t operating properly, and needs to be replaced. Fortunately, after completing this puzzle the final challenge is at least a little more fun, if not the most taxing thing to work out. It did allow our younger group member to get involved though, which he enjoyed.

One other big complaint - the 60 minute timer wasn’t set in our room, so we had ZERO idea of how long we had left, or how long it took us to get our. We’re guessing 45 mins, but nobody came to tell us (assuming they were timing it) and the clock in our room just sat at 60:00 the whole time. Weirdly it eliminated any urgency we had, and made the whole thing a fairly leisurely experience…

However, outside of all that, arguably one of the things I think we liked least about this room was our host. They were the opposite of welcoming, were cold and just too officious. We heard the host for The Flying Dutchman was much better (and seemingly did a great job of adding to the experience), but our own host seriously effected the enthusiasm we had as a group. My son is autistic, and the host was fairly curt with him a few times, over the radio, when he touched things he shouldn't have done. A simple reminder, would've been far more appropriate.

We booked Butcher’s Lair and Wizarding School, and our group of 12 was split into 2 in order to do them.

Though we had a good report from the team that played the Wizarding School (who really enjoyed their experience) unfortunately our room hadn’t been reset in any capacity. So after a few moments of being in there, our host came in and started trying to quickly reset everything.

We offered to leave whilst he did it, but the surprises in the room had largely been spoilt at that point. There were other minor issues once we did finally get up and running (e.g. the radio being on the wrong channel so we were randomly chatting to someone else not in the building!) but largely it was okay after that initial screw-up.

Fortunately, after submitting a complaint about the room not being reset, we were kindly offered the chance to do another room for free, if we wanted to return.

Butcher’s Lair itself is not a great escape room regardless. For a horror room, which should be laden with atmosphere; it was the most well lit space you could imagine and it was very light on the horror and scares. Having done other horror-themed escape rooms we’d say it was probably the least favourite we’ve done out of all of them. In fact, probably among the top 3 worst rooms we've done in all.

The design of the room was great in general - loved the animatronics and the overall idea of monster construction was cool. That aspect was well put together and the story felt logical in its presentation. We really enjoyed the puzzle involving the pull strings, although some of the other puzzles (towards the beginning) felt weirdly obtuse in comparison. There were some neat touches throughout though, and one fun 'jump scare' moment that made us laugh. Few issues for us that stopped it from being 5 stars: *Music was too loud at times, making the final puzzle almost impossible to solve due to its audio nature. *The final puzzle had some issues due to the components not working correctly, and we had to have help to complete it. This made it all a bit anti-climactic and my honest feeling is that it needs a rethink *Our host was good and kept in character well, but a few of our group complained about him having very cheesy breath which made the opening close-quarters moments a bit sickening for them. A strange complaint, but felt it was worth mentioning!

From the moment we got in, it's clear this is a high class establishment. The care that Far (our host) took with us was truly excellent. and the overall experience made it easily the best escape room I've played so far. Production design was high, and it's an excellent entry level escape room that is both fun and logical throughout. None of the puzzles stumped us too much (apart from us not pulling locks hard enough when we had the right code!) and the whole room felt very fluid in its progression. Really looking forward to returning and trying 'Revenge of the Sheep' next. Highly recommended!