All over a bit too quickly
The Crypt escape room will transport you to the investigation of Dr. Ghoul’s disappearance, a collector of artifacts with sinister/ paranormal backgrounds. After finding his secret vault beneath his home you’ve become trapped by an evil presence, which has been sealed within.
Now it’s your team’s goal to solve the clues and puzzles to escape while trying to find out what happened to Dr. Ghoul.
We’ve been to the New Forest on numerous occasions and weren’t aware of any escape rooms there, but on a whim I decided to check Escape the Review just to check we hadn’t missed anything. As fate would have it, a new escape room had recently opened in Fordingbridge, just down the road from where we were staying – perfect.
Normally we play games as a team of two, but on this occasion we were joined by a chap called ‘Panda’ (not his real name, probably…). He’s active on the Escape Room Enthusiast Facebook group so thought it would be nice to meet a new person and have the extra brain power. Annoyingly this venue has a fixed price per person regardless of how many, so it didn’t actually save us any money.
Arcadia is a company we’re not familiar with, but I gather they’re quite big in the area for their seasonal scream events (under the name ‘Scream Aloud’). They’ve now branched out into escape rooms and The Crypt is their first room – which is actually in a basement/crypt like area, so that works.
We arrived at the venue and were greeted by a suitably creepy waiting area filled with various ephemera which helped to set the scene, and eerie ambient music – although there was nowhere to actually sit and wait. We also couldn’t help but notice the large ‘fastest times’ leaderboard which we wondered if we’d make it on to (spoiler alert: we did. We got top with a time of 19 minutes taken).
We were greeted by our GM, but didn’t catch his name. We had a short chat while we waited for Panda to arrive, and then when he did, it was time to get down to business. Both the room and health and safety briefings took place in the upstairs waiting area, and then we were led down the stairs to the room. This game is in a basement like area so if you struggle with stairs (and later crawling) then this is not a game for you.
IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN
In terms of immersion, this was a room called ‘The Crypt’ and it felt Crypt like, so that was ok. It was dark. There were ambient noises. So I guess it had the key things needed for setting the scene. It was filled with lots of random bits and pieces, certainly things that I wouldn’t want in any room I was sleeping in!
This game instantly failed with one of my biggest pet peeves in dark rooms – not enough torches. We were a team of three but were only given two torches. This meant that one person either couldn’t do anything or had to follow someone else around.
They advertise it on their social media profiles, so it’s not a spoiler to say that this is a game with a live actor. Despite being a live actor horror room, they are not there to scare you but apparently to ‘help you’. A lot of people get freaked out by live actors but this was certainly on the lighter side from what we have experienced before.
PUZZLES
I would guess that this game has been designed to be more of an ‘experience’ room rather than a puzzle room. It was certainly very lacking in puzzles and the fact that we completed it in 19 minutes was testament to that (especially when you consider the delays, but more on that later).
If you’re not a fan of padlocks then you’ll not like this room as all puzzles seemed to give a combination for a padlock. I don’t recall seeing any tech used at all, which is not a negative, just an observation.
The puzzles made for a very linear style of gameplay where each puzzle led on to the next. Lighting, thanks to not enough torches was one puzzle/hindrance, and the other puzzles were; observation, minor searching, some kinda dexterous type of puzzles, and a little decoding.
We were expecting more puzzles, and somehow all of us forgot what our mission was so when we completed it we were very surprised when the GM appeared and said ‘Congratulations’. A bit of an anticlimax really.
GM/CLUE SYSTEM
We were told if we needed clues we simply had to shout for them, but as this room was on the easier side of things, we didn’t need any help at all. Not sure how clues would have been given, perhaps over a speaker system? If you play, let us know.
So this game had a live actor, and he did a good job to disguise himself so he didn’t look like the GM we had just encountered and chatted with upstairs. The big negative for us was that everytime the actor came in we were supposed to turn off torches and just stand around and wait for him to leave. This meant we spent a lot of our 19 minutes just waiting for him to go, and I would guess that was probably at least 9 minutes of our time right there. I’ve got nothing against live actors, but this just got frustrating for us.
Credit to the GM though, he stayed in character and played his part well. Even when we threw a curve ball and did something that we would guess no other team had done, he just stayed in character and then called us ‘Big Meanies’ as he left the room – sadly that was actually the highlight of the game for us.
ANYTHING ELSE
This game worked out at just over £4 per minute that we were in it, and if you ignore wasted time then that figure rises closer to £8 per minute. A premium price for an experience that just felt a bit lacking and frustrating.
Perhaps this is a good escape room for new teams, or those wanting to brave their first “live actor,” but if you’ve played more than five games then you’ll likely have seen a lot of the puzzle props before and will be out in an equally quick time.
Success/Failure
Final Rating:
Operation | |
Puzzles | |
Room Design | |
GM/Clues | |
Excitement |
Team: 3 players – escaped in 19 mins
Address: 55 Highstreet, Fordingbridge, SP6 1AS
Website: https://www.the-crypt.co.uk
Leave a Reply