EO Escape Rooms: Scarlet (Sudbury)

Wholesome family fun – and a parrot!

Scarlet, the sacred red parrot of the EOnian Tribe has been stolen by poachers. The EOnian Tribe believe that without Scarlet their settlement will be cursed.

A search for Scarlet is about to commence and the Village Elder has asked for your help.

Time is running out and you have a job to do. Can you help bring Scarlet home before she is gone forever?

Our final full length game at EO Escape Rooms for the day after playing; Castaway, Captive, Karma Club, and Scary Tale, was Scarlet. We very much went into all of the games at EO not having a clue what they were about. So when I saw this room was called ‘Scarlet’, and knowing there seems to be a tendency for escape rooms to call their horror games after little girls (Edith, Zoe, Abigail etc…, I just assumed it was a horror themed game with a spirit called Scarlet – how wrong was I!

Our mission briefing took place in the reception area once again and then we were escorted to the entrance to the room. Once in the room and ready for our timer to start it was very clear to see that this was very far from being a horror room, and Scarlet was in fact a parrot.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

I didn’t have a clue what to expect in this game so I was pleasantly surprised that on entering the room we were confronted by a very well lit tiki-hut type of space. This was a lovely space to spend an hour and there was one feature in the game that certainly stole the show – was it needed? No. Was it cool and added an extra dimension to the room? You betcha!

This was a nice space to be in and everything in the room felt like it belonged in a jungle village environment (going on my Discovery Channel viewing that is). It was probably not the most accessible of games at EO so if you have limited mobility it would be worth checking the venue. At least one person on your team will need to do a little crawling at one point.

Suitably atmospheric music was playing at all times which went some way to help us forget that we were on an industrial estate just outside of Sudbury, in fact it was actually quite lovely – this is one of those rooms I’d have gladly just grabbed a bean bag and chilled in for the rest of the day.

PUZZLES

I’m going to mention it first, as it was one of my favourite features at EO Escape Rooms; the bonus puzzle. Each of their rooms has a bonus puzzle that you can choose to solve that gives you an additional ten minutes on your time. This is a puzzle that can be solved pretty much at any time and is always a cause for celebration.

The rest of the puzzles were all logical and fortunately had the great signposting that we’d come to love from EO and their games. Directions, physical (lots of fun), observation, searching, colours, decoding and communication were the main puzzles types we encountered in Scarlet. Communication was a little trickier due to the rather large ‘special feature’ in the room, but I still wouldn’t change it in the slightest as it gave the room the ‘wow’ factor.

There’s not really much more to say about the puzzles in Scarlet, they made sense, fit the theme, and it all came full circle when we completed our mission. One puzzle felt like it went on for quite a while, yet because the room was just generally so lovely, it didn’t feel like a chore. Oh and of course we did our usual trick of overcomplicating a puzzle, sometimes you really just need to keep things simple!

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Off the top of my head I don’t recall needing any clues in Scarlet – I know we were close at one point but then we worked out what we needed to do. Because of this though I don’t actually remember much about the clue system, so I’m going to assume it was like their other games where a clue would come through on the screen (yep, just had it confirmed by our friends over at Brit of an Escape Habit). I do however remember that in this game it would have been accompanied by the sound of a monkey.

ANYTHING ELSE

It’s nice to find an original theme for an escape room, and also nice that this girl’s name was not part of a horror experience! Scarlet was a delightful game with some wonderful moments. If I could just arrange that memory wipe, I’d play it again in a heartbeat!

Success / Failure

Final Rating:

Team: 2 players – escaped in 28:25 mins (we got the bonus 10 mins)

Address: Unit 1 Drury Dr, Sudbury CO10 1WH

Website: https://www.eo-escape.co.uk/