Escape Room Cottage (Tewkesbury)

The perfect weekend away

The Escape Cottage is just like a self-catering holiday house, but it’s filled with clues and puzzles, all tied together into a story for you to discover. So book the house with a group of friends or family, put your detective hats on and have lots of fun!

We’re always looking for excuses to get out and play some escape rooms with friends, so when we saw some last minute availability at the Escape Room Cottage in Tewkesbury, we jumped at the chance (literally, we had two days’ notice). Although looking at their AirBnb listing at the time of writing, they seem to have opened up many slots, so get booked in while you can!

We’ve played some long escape room experiences before (mostly in Athens), but never one that promises potentially 11-12 hours of puzzling! Ok, we didn’t take that long but the joy of having the entire cottage for the weekend is that you can go at your own pace. We felt like we went pretty leisurely and completed everything in around 6-6.5 hours of actual puzzling time, but we are a very experienced team and often go through games quickly, so that is not a criticism at all.

The Escape Room Cottage is a bit of an odd one to review as we’re essentially reviewing the escape room AND accommodation, so to keep things simple, we’ll use our ‘play at home’ rating system and then add a little extra to cover the accommodation aspect.

Travelling as two couples we arrived within about 30 minutes of each other, one of the couples having detoured to Costco to collect some much needed brain food and supplies for the weekend. After a quick unload we all agreed not to investigate anything until we were all ready to investigate. This meant we could sit down and have a civilised meal (pizza is civilised, right?).

There was a package waiting for us when we arrived so that is where we started. This package explained the story and what our mission was. There was also a secondary document that contained all the house rules. This was like a typical document that you would find in any holiday rental detailing things like how to turn on the heating, emergency exits etc… but they had produced this ‘in character’ so that it blended with the story.

With pizza devoured, the rules read and a beer in hand, it was time to get down to business. So at 8pm we started exploring the cottage and trying to work out what was a puzzle and what was just lovely decor. For what it’s worth, we got a bit carried away on this first evening and ended up solving puzzles until around midnight… Whoops!

CONCEPT/EXECUTION

The world needs more experiences like this. We spent a lovely time solving puzzles and then as we finished them early we had the rest of the weekend to hang out and play other puzzle games, and explore the lovely town of Tewkesbury.

At first things were a little overwhelming as you try to work out what is a puzzle, but you soon start to realise how they think and what is worth focussing your attention on. There were a few quick wins which helped get you moving and set you up with the main part of the game where you find a system to help you input your solutions to puzzles. This also helped to sign-post where you may need to look next and give you an indication of what you are looking for.

As I mentioned earlier, you can pretty much go at your own pace and just solve as and when you like. Saying that, there is one puzzle where you will need to stick to a certain time frame to be able to solve it, and another where you will need to go for a (lovely) walk around town – so you may want to do that one in the daylight. We were lucky and it was an unusually sunny day when we needed to go out and about in Tewkesbury, and it made all the difference. There is also another puzzle that has a time limit, but they’re very clear about this and you can start it when you’re feeling ready.

This was a great experience and we have no regrets that we played it, but it could have been better with just a few minor tweaks to the puzzles and the story. It’s hard to explain exactly what these are without giving spoilers, but in terms of the story it would have been nice to get some closure to what the outcome of our final decision had on the story. We thought perhaps this would come after we had left, but it hasn’t, and it would have been nice to have left the property with this closure.

PUZZLES

There were a lot of puzzles in this cottage, but then again when 11-12 hours of puzzling is promised, you would expect there to be ample content. Even taking 6 hours we didn’t feel like we had been short changed on the content, either quantity or quality.

Perhaps the joy of the puzzles were that some of the things you needed were in plain sight, and you could be sitting down enjoying a cup of tea when you spot something out of the corner of your eye that you suddenly realise is the missing piece that you’ve been needing. We genuinely had one of these moments when we were on one of our latter puzzles and watching the joy in our teammate when he realised what he had just seen/solved was truly wonderful – these are the moments we live for as escape room enthusiasts.

There was most definitely a wide range of puzzles in the Escape Room Cottage, and arguably there was something for all ages; searching (some very sneaky), observation, logic, decoding, maths, colours, audio, and wordplay were all in abundance. Actually, the puzzles started even before we arrived at the cottage, so no pressure but if you don’t solve one of the puzzles, you may not even get into the accommodation (don’t worry, it’s simple enough and I’m sure they’d provide help if needed).

There were a couple of bonus puzzles that were apparently a little harder to solve so it was nice to have the extra layer of puzzling. Many of the puzzles resulted in a code that needed to be entered somewhere but there were also good old fashioned padlocks and some cool tech too. What was more impressive was some of the surprises they managed to hide away in this Grade 2 listed property.

We did find that at times we were perhaps too good with our investigations and we did find and solve some things before we were pointed towards them by solving other puzzles. It didn’t detract from anything as it was still a joy to solve the puzzles, it just didn’t perhaps progress us as much as we thought it should.

Most of the puzzles you knew when they were complete, but one puzzle you didn’t which we found frustrating. This was a search puzzle, so if you weren’t confident you had found everything you could have spent hours turning the place upside down. Again, a couple of tweaks to this would have made it better and less frustrating.

CLUE SYSTEM

We found that if we took time to step back a little we didn’t actually need any clues. There seemed to be three systems in place for getting help.

1. There was a small box with hints to help with one specific early puzzle
2. Once you progressed you then obtained a different system for help. Again, we didn’t use it, but it looked like it would give you enough to progress and probably the solution if you were stuck.
3. There was a number you could contact if you were REALLY stuck or had any issues.

It was nice knowing that there was help available, but I would definitely advise to just take a step back and see if you can solve it with a nice cup of tea (or beer).

ACCOMMODATION

What a lovely place to stay! The cottage is a grade two listed cottage on one of the main roads through Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. It’s worth noting that there is no parking on site, but there are a number of car parks very close by (and they’re also reasonably priced).

We visited the cottage as four adults (two couples) and as such had plenty of space thanks to the three bedrooms and three bathrooms. One of the bedrooms has a double bed, another has two singles, and the final is just a single. The bathrooms each had a shower (one had a bath too), although being completely honest the shower pressure was pretty dire!

It seems like the mattress on the double bed was decent but the two singles had really terrible mattresses (we can’t comment on the third single). Couple that with rather thin curtains and there wasn’t a lot of quality sleep happening in the cottage – but we were there to puzzle not sleep anyway.

The kitchen was well stocked and for the things we cooked, we found we had pretty much everything we needed. We also kept the fridge well stocked with beer and there was plenty of room for that.

The other areas of the house were nice although we probably spent most of our time in the kitchen where we could solve the house puzzles, and then some additional puzzles in our own time. The living room was comfortable and had a very elegant feel with lots of natural light.

Really, other than the uncomfortable beds and the shower pressure, it was a really lovely stay and even these minor inconveniences didn’t dampen the weekend fun.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Would we recommend the Escape Room Cottage? Yes. 100% yes! If you see a slot where you can get booked in, BOOK IT! We loved our time in the cottage and would love to see more experiences like this opening up.

My first thoughts were that this wasn’t a cheap weekend away, but actually when you look at the cost of other accommodation in Tewkesbury, and you consider what 6-12 escape rooms would cost, then the value suddenly looks rather good!

Bonus Top Tips: 

• Don’t unload personal belongings into bedrooms until you’ve all investigated. It will make it easier to know what is part of the house.
• Explore everything before you get started on solving puzzles.
• If you’re stuck, sit down, have a tea, you may see something you’ve been missing
• Be sure to look thoroughly in every room (that you have access to)

Final Rating:

Team: 4 players

Time Taken: 6/6.5 hours puzzling – an entire weekend of fun

Website: https://escaperoomcottage.com/