Lakes Escapes – Baker Street

From https://www.lakesescapes.co.uk/

A dead body will soon be discovered at the shipping docks.

A notorious gang of mysterious criminals known as the Baker Street Five held a secret meeting to plan their most elaborate heist yet. This meeting quickly took an unexpected turn and a minor disagreement escalated into a heated argument.  Shots were fired, one crew member lay dead, the remaining crew members immediately fled the scene.

Can you decipher the clues and find out who the murderer is. One word of warning, the leader will be leaving the country within the next hour, so you’d better work quickly.

Team- Ster, Ni, Rachel, Ben

Played 1/8/18

(Reviewed by Ster)

Lakes Escapes

Lakes Escapes was fairly easy to find, about a 35 minute drive from Keswick, where we were staying. Inside, there wasn’t any seating but as our game was ready didn’t need any. One thing that made this game different to others that I’ve played is that we had our briefing inside the actual room. I found this a bit strange as it meant that I wasn’t really listening to what our host was saying, I was just looking around the room for clues!

I have to say that I was upset we weren’t allowed to use our usual team name and were instead assigned a name of our games master’s choosing. It seemed quite petty to say that our name was not appropriate because we had asked for a single clue, the name has two possible meanings and that’s why we enjoy using it.  I was quite taken aback that our games master refused to write it on the board.

The Room

The room itself was quite a sparse office set-up. We were told before we went in that there were a lot of word puzzles, which meant that we spent the beginning of the game looking for anagrams or wordplay or riddles of some sort but we never actually found any! There were a few puzzles that required using the alphabet, but I wouldn’t let the word puzzles introduction put anyone off – it’s an achievable room even if you don’t have a scrabble champion amongst you!

The premise was that we were looking for the members of a notorious gang after the murder of one of their own before they fled the country. We needed to find the names of both the gang members and the victims, which meant that we hoarded anything with a name on just in case it was relevant! We also came across a few scrabble tiles and I really liked how these were used to give us different clues. The first one was quite confusing, but once we’d realised how it worked, the others that we found came in very useful and they were a fun element of the game that kept making us smile.

The game itself was fairly linear and I don’t think that we really found a puzzle that needed more than one of us to complete, so there were moments of us all standing around watching one person. There were also a few puzzles that could be completed out of order, which can get a bit confusing in a linear game!

Score

The puzzles in this room weren’t all that taxing to be honest. The linear aspect meant that quite often we became stuck because one member of the team was holding the next part of the game, they just hadn’t realised it yet, rather than because we couldn’t work out the answer! That being said, it is in an area where there really aren’t that many escapes around and they have a variety of rooms with 3 different themes.

Difficulty

2/5

Overall

2/5