A home I would like to come home to
You’ve been away for some time, you arrive at your front door and push it open. Inside it’s clear no one has been here for sometime. You light the fire and then start searching for clues as to where your wife and small child have been taken.
There aren’t many escape rooms in Somerset (although that number is growing), so every time we’re down there we always have a look to see if Lock and Code have any new offerings. Technically Homecoming isn’t new as it is one of their older rooms, but we seemed to keep missing it – not this time!
Homecoming used to be located at their Weston-Super-Mare branch but is now in their Taunton location (technically a little way outside of Taunton). Lock and Code seem to rejig their rooms every-now-and-then and switch between their locations, which makes sense, not everyone is willing to travel for escape rooms like us weirdos.
The Taunton location of Lock and Code is actually located in Creech St Michael which is a lovely little village about five miles outside of Taunton but is still very easy to get to, and there is free parking on site. The location is actually the site of an old paper mill and Lock and Code are certainly making the most of the space they have there. Currently they have four games in this location and it looks like they have room to put in at least one more.
When we arrived we were greeted by our GM, who we think was called Al, but we can’t actually remember, so we’ll just call him Al from now on. We waited in the sizable waiting area while Al did some final checks of the room then when he came back he proceeded to give us the health and safety briefing and explained our mission.
Covid Practices: Hand sanitiser, gloves and face masks were available in the waiting area. Our GM wore his mask at all times, as did we. We didn’t see any other teams during our time on site.
PUZZLES
There’s no denying it, there were a lot of padlocks in this room – in a mixture of three and four digits, and keys and word padlocks. Personally I quite like padlocks so this wasn’t a negative for me, but I know a lot of people die a little when they see padlocks everywhere. It wasn’t all padlocks though and there was still some tech thrown in for good measure.
The puzzles themselves were of a good variety, some sneaky searching (but not a search heavy room), observational, and there was a little wordplay and logic. We weren’t a big fan of the word play puzzle as it felt like we should have had more information to solve it, but actually everything we needed was there and it was straight forward. Saying that, some form of writing implements would have made our life easier here.
One puzzle was a little more physical in nature, but you don’t need any level of fitness to be able to do it, if you can move around the room, you’ll be fine. We encountered a slight issue with this puzzle as it gave us the wrong solution, but our GM was keeping an eye on us and quickly corrected the error.
The game played in a semi-linear fashion, so it was quite clear to know where we needed to go next once we had solved something. I say ‘semi-linear’ because we actually solved something out of order so when we later found the puzzle for the item we had solved earlier we were a little confused.
IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN
The first thing you notice when you walk into this room is that it is a rather large space, and actually feels really rather cosy. The room is dark in places, but not so dark that you can’t see what you need. I think in normal (non-covid) times torches would likely have been provided just to make it easier to see padlock numbers, but we were told we could use our phone torches if we needed additional light.
Rooms that are designed as studies or living rooms are unlikely to ever really blow your mind, but nothing in this room really felt out of place and as I mentioned before, this room was cosy. I could quite easily have just sat in the wingback chair by the fire and let Liz do all the work! Adding to the cosy feeling was the ambient/background music that was being played the entire time we were in there.
There were a number of items in the room that we thought were important at first glance but these later turned out to be just set dressing. I wouldn’t go so far to say they were red herrings, but at least one item distracted us for a little longer than it should have.
GM/CLUE SYSTEM
Our GM, Al (we think) was pretty new to the job and even escape rooms themselves, but that inexperience didn’t show through at all. He read the room well and only chimed in when he really needed to – if something wasn’t working quite right, or we had solved something without realising. We couldn’t see his face (thanks to the face masks) but he seemed happy to be there and was friendly and upbeat the entire time we were with him.
Clues/Nudges were delivered in text over a screen that was in the room, this screen also showed a countdown timer so we could always see how long we had left. If a clue was delivered an alert tone would sound so we knew to look at the screen.
ANYTHING ELSE
Homecoming takes place in a massive space and plays out in a mostly linear fashion. You are unlikely to be blown away by the set, but you may see a puzzle or two that you haven’t seen before.
Success / Failure
Final Rating:
| Operation | |
| Puzzles | |
| Room Design | |
| GM/Clues | |
| Excitement |
Team: 2 players (escaped in around 37 minutes)
Address: Creech St Michael Paper Mill, Mill Lane, Taunton, Somerset, TA3 5PX
Website: https://www.lockandcode.co.uk
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