LockHouse Escape Games – Armageddon

Scores

Variety of puzzles 3/5                                                 Originality of puzzles 2.5/5

Pre-game atmosphere 1/5                                         Difficulty 2/5

Overall 2/5

Overview – The less experienced escapers in our team found the room to be a lot of fun, but those with a few more escapes under our belt were left a little underwhelmed. There’s a nice variety of puzzles but it’s a pretty short experience and a very crowded one with seven players.

From – https://lockhouse.co.uk/

Work with your team to destroy a giant asteroid hurtling towards the Earth! Find the secret laboratory hidden within a rather strange University department and figure out how to launch the asteroid defense missile.

Team – Ster, Ni, Ros, Naomi, Robin, Liz, Tim

Lockhouse Escape Games

The waiting area in Lockhouse has a lot of different things to do with puzzles and games available on every surface, but we were waiting for 20 minutes before anyone even acknowledged us which wasn’t a great start. Add that to the fact that our games master had no idea what our escape time was and tried to tell us that we’d taken almost 50 minutes when we were out less than half an hour after our start time, I really wasn’t impressed.

Armageddon

There are a good variety of puzzles in this escape and some nice elements that linked together well, including one particular puzzle had a really high level of originality. I am surprised though that they have chosen to make this room 7 players as there really wasn’t that much to do. Thankfully, we were playing with some very inexperienced players who were excited about everything.

The experience started off quite slowly, with a fairly sparse room that had a very linear puzzle sequence. Once we had solved this section though there was a bit more to do with a much higher variety of different puzzles and a few different things going on at once.

At one point close to the end, we weren’t sure why we’d found an extra set of keys so I held them up to the camera and asked about them but received no response. When our games master then came in at the end of the experience, he was very angry that we’d used the wrong keys to solve one of the puzzles, which suggested to me that he wasn’t watching our game at all. I’m also very confused as to why 1 set of keys in the room would be capable of opening 2 different locks – surely this is a serious flaw in the game?

All in all, I’m in no hurry to revisit. It was a nice experience for new players and there was an original element to the game, but an angry games master coupled with no recorded time and broken puzzles really ruined the enjoyability of the experience.

Escape time – ?