Do Stuff Escape Games – Hostage Hideout

Summary
Wonderful hosts make this a memorable game. Innovative puzzles. Quite cramped inside. A couple of defects.

Review
Battersea is probably best known for the dogs and cats home, but a recent addition to the local businesses is Do Stuff Escape Games. Sharing space with the Grove, an amazing gaming pub with all sorts of cult memorabilia strewn around, it’s a recent addition to south London’s escape room stable. Team Judge was taking up the Groupon offer to try it out.

Tipped off by the various reviews, we arrived in good enough time to order from the bountiful menu of burgers (lamb, beef, horse, venison, chicken, and veggie all feature) and these were most enjoyable.
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Escape London – Da Vinci

Summary
Whilst Da Vinci is perhaps an overused theme, we warmed to this room quickly and found it the best of the three on the premises. Puzzles were just right for difficulty. Decent fun.

Review
Escape London is like a good wine — they improve with age. We’re not talking years or more, though: we first visited them two weeks prior and given they only opened at the start of August it was eminently clear they were learning fast.

Da Vinci, then, was our third and final outing for now. Rejoined by linkaneo and reb, Team Judge made good time to arrive for our visit. Linkaneo repeated her old joke about rugs, and we all know what that means…
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Escape London – Area 51

Summary
Highly linear, lots of different and new kinds of puzzles to enjoy in a sci-fi themed adventure. Accessible for beginners.

Review
A week later and a player shorter, Team Judge (linkaneo, reb, and I) returned for our second visit to Escape London, on this occasion full of Nando’s. The staff were as pleasant as ever and made small talk until the appointed time.

The story here is investigating an alien invasion incident in a restricted area. I’m not sure why we only had an hour to do it, although it might have been because we’d get nicked, or abducted, or something. It didn’t really matter, as you will see.
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Escape London – Casino

Summary
A twist on the normal “you need to get out” model, this game has an extra way to separate the best teams. Challenging game with a great many padlocks. Extremely friendly and attentive staff.

Review
Off to West London this time and after a very filling Five Guys (is there any other kind?) in Westfield White City, Team Judge (reb, linkaneo, emmy and myself) were excited to visit new-to-the-market Escape London. We took up their 50% off discount for booking before they opened (it’d have been rude not to) and this was the first of three rooms to play.

We were very warmly welcomed on arrival and after a few rather Spartan experiences at other venues it was nice to see jugs of water and the like on reception. Paperwork signed and all other formalities dealt with, it was time to get going.

The goal in this room is to escape, but also to “get rich” by filling a chip case with as many casino chips as possible.
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Omescape – Biohazard Laboratory

Summary
A strongly linear adventure with impeccable theming. Limited light means a need to concentrate carefully. Despite being Omescape’s lowest-difficulty room, it’s not one for new players. Puzzles, technology, and build quality are excellent with virtually no reliance on padlocks and not a key in sight. Five players is probably too many.

Review
Team Amaze booked both copies of Biohazard Laboratory for a total of ten players. On the day we lost Bubbles who had to drop out at short notice, so after asking around the rest of Team Amaze and drawing a blank, we picked up Emmy from Team Ninty to fill out the second team. She had transport issues on her way up and therefore it was 8 minutes into our slot before everyone was on site. Mig and Vicky led team Alpha featuring Emmy and Will whilst Agent P and I were on Team Omega. [Both teams were 5 players, we just haven’t got alter-ego names for everyone else yet =p]

Our host gave us the short version of the welcome so as not to delay things further. He kindly did not deduct this from our time clock, and we got underway with the explanation of our mission – poisonous agents have been introduced into the water network and we needed to go into the sewers to add the antidote and get back out again, collecting some MacGuffins on the way.
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Clockwork Dog – Langstroth’s Last Riddle

Summary
Extremely immersive pop-up location, themed exquisitely to a limiting venue. Amazing hosts. Mixture of puzzles including search, logic, calculations, combination locks, and the obligatory trapdoor. Best room I’ve played to date.

Review
Note: This room is no longer in operation (and this review got caught up in a backlog, hence why it’s been nearly two months coming). I’ve taken somewhat of a liberty and am a bit less cautious about spoilers in the review as a result. I accept it’s possible that Clockwork Dog may try the same thing again sometime in the future, in which case I guess I’ll cut it back or deal with the consequences, but I think they’re planning something different.

I read about this room’s short tenure over on The Logic Escapes Me in early June. With an escape planned with Team Nintendo and no room booked, I proposed this location to the group but got overruled in favour of Professor Oxford’s Experiment by nintendomad. Still had a good feeling about Clockwork Dog and therefore I polled Facebook for interest. With positives from reb and linkaneo who would be playing their third game, this became a Team Judge outing.
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Escape Salisbury – Murder at the Museum

Summary
If you’re in Salisbury, you should have played this already. If not, you should book and go there. Quite soon. This room has just about all the things that make an escape room fun, none of the annoying things that wind players up, and it’s a well thought-out room which receives our Generally Awesome award.

Review
Salisbury is the smallest city in the UK, and many visitors come to visit a certain church and piece of paper. Not so for us: Emmy and Nintendomad joined me on this Team Ninty outing to visit temporary South Wiltshire resident Hipsterdashie and take on the challenge at Escape Salisbury.

This room is rather like your typical murder mystery but with additional twists in terms of collecting certain items, on your way through a set of challenges set by the “Wessex Police”, from whom a briefing document accompanied our email confirmation. We were met in character by our host who was very much up to speed with everything and gave us enough explanation of the room and process, and no more. The customary explanation of how to identify items not to be touched (police tape!) aside, it was time to begin.
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Escape Land – Professor Oxford’s Experiment

Summary
Relatively basic and straightforward room with a Steampunk theme. A few complex puzzles but something for everyone. Pleasingly non-linear. High level of combination locks.

Review
Team Ninety joined me for this challenge with a couple of players new to the format. The venue is in the basement of a nondescript building on Oxford Street, near the Tottenham Court Road end.

We arrived a little early and were invited to take a seat on the couch with a few metal puzzles to play about with whilst we waited. And waited. The reception area was comfortable with a very soft couch. Eventually our host came to introduce himself and take us through the process.
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Escape Room Manchester – Slaughter House

Summary
Quite samey, this dark room depended a lot on searching for items. Not enough torches provided. Puzzles quite pedestrian. And did we say dark?

Review
This was the second room Team Judge played on the same day. Dropping from a difficulty rating of 5 to 4, we expected a bit of a step down in difficulty. In practice, it was similarly challenging but in a different way.

Our host Alice was very pleasant and practiced and she explained the room’s procedure in very brief for us. The room’s back story is the slightly hackneyed “you wake up in ____ with no real clue of why you’re here and you’d better get out in an hour”, and that was good for what it was. Alice was also obliging in turning down the background sound for a team member with a hearing issue.
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Escape Room Manchester – Secret Lab

Summary
A small number of tough puzzles rather than a large number of straightforward puzzles or a mixture in difficulty awaits you at Secret Lab. Can you rise to the challenge?

Review
A bit of bumbling at the start of this, with the hosts unable to open up the front door because it was a bank holiday and apparently someone from the nightclub that’s colocated with them had padlocked a door which was usually left open. We eventually crowded in through an emergency exit after a host came around to the main door to see us looking nonplussed.

As venues go, The Escape Room Manchester is well-equipped and very pleasant. The waiting area was one of the best I’ve found, and they were also happy to store several members’ large items of luggage whilst we went off to the city centre afterwards for a couple of hours.
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