Tag: Team Judge

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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AIM Escape – Psychopath’s Lair

Summary
It takes a lot for me to declare a game unfair, and I’m not going to start a habit here. Unfun, however, is one label I’m prepared to dish out when it’s deserved – and Psychopath’s Lair is definitely that. What a mess.

Review
The (then) recently opened AIM Escape was the first outing in some time for Team Judge after a member of Team Judge won a free game in a Facebook competition.

Minor mishaps started on arrival with insufficient locker space to store a moderate amount of belongings. The excess ended up in the control room. They were very particular about no phones being taken into the room, for no particularly clear reason.

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TimeTrap Escape Rooms – Imaginarium

Summary
Take lots of lights, one large dose of Lewis Carroll, and a range of puzzles, and you’re somewhere in the right direction. TimeTrap let their imagination run wild… did it work?

Review
Previously satisfied customers of TimeTrap’s Rebellion 1136, we returned for another go at the newest addition to the stable.

The premise of this room was that Lewis Carroll had had an accident and we were intrepid time travellers to 1863, ready to be shrunk down inside his brain and help him recover, making sure he proceeded to write Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the way.
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The Escape Rooms Newport – Torture Corp

Summary
A room that left us disappointed and frustrated. Innovative and faithful to its theme, probably a fun experience for those new to escape rooms, but enervating, unexciting and frustrating to veterans.

Review
I don’t normally back Kickstarters, but something about Escape Rooms Newport made it look like it stood out from the crowd. I went in for the top-level package entitling me to play the game in a team of up to 6 and then act as the game master for another team. I gave the room a month and a half or so to get into gear before coming down from London for the day to try it all out.

I recruited eight members of Team Judge to come and play across two attempts – playing myself in the first round, and acting as the host second time around for my friends. The experience started the day before, somewhat intriguingly, but to say more would be a spoiler.
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TimeTrap Escape Rooms – Rebellion – 1136

Summary
TimeTrap have found themselves a new permanent venue in Reading and opened up quite a good room – a non-linear game good for beginners and with a pleasing mix of puzzle types.

Review
To celebrate a Team Judge moving-house party, we booked into TimeTrap’s new game soon after it opened. The theme of the room is, as the name suggests, acting as rebels after the death of King Henry I who was laid to rest in Reading Abbey – and the goal is to enter through a time portal and obtain the crown, which has been stolen, to restore it to the rightful monarch.
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Lucardo – Espionage

Summary
I’d heard a lot of good things about Lucardo and so when I knew I’d have a Saturday evening free in Manchester it was top of my to-do list. Espionage is a World War II themed room with very little linearity and mostly straightforward puzzles, great for beginners.

Review
Espionage is rated as the least difficult of Lucardo’s five rooms. A new subset of Team Judge was playing, with a total of two games’ worth of experience between everyone other than me, so it seemed a sensible choice. I had hoped to play The Dream on recommendation, but as we booked so late it wasn’t available.
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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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Enigma Quests – School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Summary
A variation on “you’re in here, now get out”, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry makes progress more tangible and has great theming of its puzzles.

Review
Let’s leave the intellectual property question out of this particular review – it’s a good storyline, and the room theming and decoration were certainly on-point.
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Lock’d – Perpetuum Mobile

Summary
We loved the tech and theming of the room, which a lot of love and effort has clearly gone into. Pretty short though.

Review
Having played the venue’s other two games earlier that day, we found out that Perpetuum Mobile was free in the next slot and our host reeled us in with a discount, the room otherwise likely to go empty. It would have been rude not to.

We were invited to don lab coats to play; I must say I think this is becoming a bit of a trope. It’s the third or fourth time I’ve come across it and whilst it’s cute for newbies, it’s usually a combination of overheating and uncomfortable for the rest of us. Less, please.
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Lock’d – Museum Warehouse

Summary
This room has a good premise and a few clever flashes of tech, but is let down by too little to do, unexciting puzzles, and loads of red herrings.

Review
This was our second of what was planned to be two (but ended up as three) rooms in one day at Lock’d. Having polished off Grandpa’s Last Will we were expecting a step up in difficulty. Our excellent host gave us the initial briefing – the premise was needing to break into the museum and recover three statuettes which would also (for some reason) release the exit door.
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