Angle Escape: Candy Shop (Peterborough)

I’ll take you to the Candy Shop…

This lovely old shopkeeper is less than sweet.

Children love the local candy shop and they love the friendly, warm, charming old lady who’s owned it forever. The village children all go in with pocket money and leave with pockets full of treats for the day. Occasionally one or two children don’t leave, but that’s probably not worth worrying about.

Some people warn that the shopkeeper isn’t quite right, but the odd mysteriously missing child isn’t exactly concrete evidence… is it?

You’ve decided to pop in for a quick visit, but the shop is surprisingly empty! You take it upon yourself to debunk the myth and prove beyond a doubt that the shop has nothing untoward about it – after all, the shopkeeper certainly won’t mind you poking around her shop whilst she’s out.

Definitely not.

Day twelve of our escape room road trip and so far today we had completed four games at Want to Escape in Rushden (Conspiracist, Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Pop, Guardian of the Gallery, and Teacher’s Revenge), and two games (Victim and Getaway) at Angle Escape – so basically a nice and leisurely day. Next up was Candy Shop.

Angle Escapes is a relative newcomer in the Peterborough escape room scene, we’d played in Peterborough before but they didn’t exist; either that or we just completely missed them. Located on the outskirts of the northern side of the city, they’re just over the road from a large Morrisons where you could get a few hours of free parking (you could when we visited).

The venue itself won’t win any design awards from outside as it is situated above a carpet shop, but Angle Escape have done a great job in making it visible thanks to their distinctive bright orange colour scheme. We took a short break between our first two games and this final one, so we went and got a bit of fresh air and tried to cool down a bit (it was a hot day). Heading back into the venue, we climbed the stairs up to the lobby and then listened intently as Adam gave us the briefing for our final game of the day. It was time to enter the Candy Shop.

Covid-19 Procedures: we wore masks at all times, as did all the staff on site. There was hand sanitiser for us to use, track and trace was also apparently in place (but we missed it). I think we may have seen one other team on site, but logistics worked well so we didn’t come in close contact with them. We played in early June 2021.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

Entering the Candy Shop we could see the inspiration as there were relevant little items for set dressing around the place, but strangely, for me it reminded me more of my old village post office than a candy shop. We expected to enter a bright and cheerful world, as you would expect with a game called ‘Candy Shop’, but that is not what we encountered at all – Angle Escape seem to have firmly decided they do horror themed games (more creepy than full-blown horror).

When we did enter the shop, lighting both was and wasn’t an issue. This game had two distinct areas that had very different feels to them, but for some unknown reason that we haven’t worked out, the first room was bathed in an oddly eerie green light. Difficulty by darkness seems to be a feature of the games at Angle Escape, and although a torch was provided it would have been nice to have had one each.

It felt like they missed an opportunity here with the set design, personally we would have gone for two extremes, the light and fun, swiftly followed by dark and horror-like, but as it was it just kind of blended together. Saying that, this was the best of the games we played at Angle Escape and each room we played improved from the previous, so we have hopes for the future that they will continue to improve.

It’s worth pointing out that we were actually locked in this room. An emergency key was provided, but I know some people are cautious about being actually locked in. We have been told that if you’re not comfortable with the door being locked, they will leave it unlocked.

PUZZLES

Candy Shop was a linear game so we couldn’t really split up too much, but it did seem like there were two possible starting points that we could work from. When we solved puzzles they usually resulted in combinations for padlocks, although there was one bit of tech (likely GM triggered) just to keep things interesting.

We once again found there to be a lack of signposting in this game like we did the others at this venue, but it had improved on the earlier games we played and we certainly needed less clues than in others.  The puzzles themselves were a mixture of observation, logic and pattern recognition with perhaps a little searching involved.

The Candy Shop actually had our favourite puzzle out of all the games at Angle Escape. It was one that was seemingly quite simple, but there was another level to it that made it clever and quite satisfying to solve – but I could just be saying that because I solved it and Liz didn’t have a clue what was going on.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Once again, I’m not really sure who our GM was, as it was either Tiff or Anya (we’ve now been informed it was Tiff, good job Tiff), but they did a good job of providing us with clues when we needed them. One positive is that this room clicked a bit more than the others so we needed less help.

When we did need assistance, our GM was quick to chime in over the speaker system and get us back on track.

ANYTHING ELSE

The Candy Shop is the best of the rooms at Angle Escape and shows that they are improving with each game they build. Darkness and lighting was still an issue but that would be easily solved by providing more (decent) torches.

Success/Failed

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players – escaped in 30:33 minutes

Address: 939 Lincoln Road, First Floor, Peterborough, PE4 6AF

Website: https://www.angleescape.com