Lock’d: Perpetuum Mobile (London)

“The most challenging escape game in London” – because it doesn’t work?

In just one hour, the world will be plunged into eternal darkness. And there’s only one person who can stop it. You.

Professor Richter, the only man with the knowledge to save the world, has disappeared. In true the answer lies in the mysterious crystals the professor left in his lab. The future of humankind is in your hands.

This room had promise, it really did but it failed in some key areas that really let it down and means we have no desire of going back and doing any more rooms at Lock’d. 

The location is fine, not the nicest part of London, but easy to get to and fine for an escape room. When we arrived we seemed to be arriving at the same time as other groups so the welcome was very cold and formal and didn’t exactly do much to make us feel welcome. 

After a short briefing on why we were there and the usual escape room blurb we were taken in to the room and time began.

It was all going well and we were progressing through the puzzles, right up until the last puzzle. This is where we got frustrated, we have 20 minutes on the clock and one puzzle to do, easy right? No. It was broken! After 10 minutes of trying to get it to work how it was supposed to we radioed the games master and asked if it was broken, the response we got was “yeah it’s working”, after another five minutes we radioed again and were then told “ok, it may be broken, just flip the big switch at the top and it will reset it”. Good bye immersion! We reset the switch and continued on, trying to make up for lost time and still finish.

The clock hit 60 minutes and the games master appeared to tell us our time was up and we had failed. No apology, no additional time to make up for the lost time in the room.

We left this room feel very frustrated and annoyed. We can only assume the Games Master was watching over multiple rooms at the same time and wasn’t able to see everything in our room, but a little token gesture at the end of a few extra minutes to let us finish would have made all the difference and changed our view on the game.

PUZZLES

The puzzles were nothing special but they worked in the context of the game. They tried to get clever with some tech which would have been cool if it had worked, but as it didn’t we can’t really comment on how it could have been. It was nice to see a company trying to get away from padlocks on everything though.

Everything seemed to flow and we were never left wondering “what do we do now”.

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

Did I feel like I was a scientist? I wore a white jacket if that counts? The room did its best to make you feel like you were in a lab and at no point did we question the placement of anything in there.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Clues were delivered by a walkie-talkie when requested. GM not attentive (see above)

ANYTHING ELSE

With a more attentive and understanding GM this would have probably been a different experience for us, but we’ll never know.

Success/Failed

FINAL RATING 

TEAM: 4 people

ADDRESS: B108, Block B, The Biscuit Factory, Drummond Road, London, SE16 4DG