TimeTrap Escape Rooms – The Divide

Summary
The Divide is something very different. Escaping rooms is a good, if expensive, hobby. Escaping a poor financial situation, homelessness, and similar is a lot more serious. Time Trap Escape Rooms sought to take up that challenge.

Review
Another Team Judge trip to Reading took us to the upstairs of a closed barber shop, where Time Trap had built their pop up escape experience. It’s physically separate from the main Time Trap premises, and thematically separate also: their default theme of time travel parked for this one.
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Escape this Room – London Bank Heist

Summary
Quite a crop of pop-up escape games in London these last few months. Escape this Room has gone to a lot of effort to build something for a month-long run and London Bank Heist was a good example of attention to detail and had something for everyone in terms of puzzles.

Review
Team Judge hit Escape this Room in its final week of operations. As it’s now closed I’m potentially going to be a little looser than usual in terms of spoilers, though only a little as I have a feeling that they will turn up again.

The story here is that you are entering the bank in the role of engineers to sort out some problems with the vault.
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Clockwork Dog – Loop

Summary
I wasn’t sure that Clockwork Dog could outdo their last attempt at a pop-up escape game. And yet they have. I’m still not quite sure how. We’ve rated it Generally Awesome, and you should go and play it, ideally before reading the rest of the review.

Review
First and foremost, this room is highly difficult to review without causing potential spoilers. If you read further it is at your own risk of finding out something you may not want to have known. I’ve put in some collapsed spoiler boxes but they don’t cover everything.
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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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