Where’s the Dragon?
You enter the ancient temple of ‘Suíjī Long’ in search of mystical treasures but your presence is awakening the fierce dragon guarding the temple.
If you leave the temple he will burn you to a crisp with his fiery breath. You only have one option; find a way to complete the symbol of the dragon which will put the temple’s deadly guardian back to a deep sleep.
If you fail to complete the symbol within 60 minutes the dragon will fully awaken and then there will be no escape from the deadly dragon!
We were on the Isle of Wight for a break with some old university friends and we noticed that in the ‘off season’ many things are closed on the island. Fortunately, escape rooms aren’t one of those things! We decided to play all four games that were currently open at Random-Rooms, The Random Room, The Cell, The Old Hospital, and The Dragon Room.
The Dragon Room was our second game of the day, and having just completed The Random Room in 22 minutes, we were feeling pretty confident. So after a short wait in the reception while our host (and the owner) Alex got The Dragon Room set up, we were raring to go. After another detailed health and safety briefing, followed by our mission briefing, we were shown to the ‘corridor of many doors’ (I’ve just decided that is what it should be called), and we entered the temple.
Covid-19 Precautions: We were the only team on site. We wore masks in the common areas but were able to remove them in the game.
IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN
This room had a very different feeling to the first room we played here, ‘The Random Room,’ but that was probably because it actually had a story tying the puzzles together. In a nutshell, we had to assemble the symbol of the dragon which would then put it back to sleep.
This room was dark but lighting wasn’t really an issue for the most part. The story said we were in a temple and I think I could see that, but it also had a Chinese takeaway vibe about it. It wasn’t poorly decorated but certainly nothing to get excited about.
The Dragon Room is one of those rooms that doesn’t really have any surprises and everything is on show early on. In a way, it’s quite unusual to have a room like this now where you don’t explore and uncover new areas as you progress, but they made good use of the space and in our team of five we never really got in each other’s way.
It’s probably also worth pointing out that in none of the games we played at Random-Rooms were the doors we entered through locked.
PUZZLES
The Dragon Room was quite an open room and played out in a mostly non-linear fashion, this meant that as a team we could split up and solve things simultaneously. We didn’t have too much issue with working out what went where but there was a puzzle, or part of a puzzle, that felt like it could have done with a bit more signposting, as it was we just happened to get lucky with it and took a chance on it.
Some of the puzzles were multi-step that we had to build on to solve completely, and early on we felt like we were in a pretty good rhythm. Then we encountered two puzzles that really slowed us down and kind of killed the room a bit for us. It didn’t help that we didn’t have everything we needed for one of the puzzles, and the other was quite a big (or it felt big) logic puzzle.
This room had a mixture of puzzles which included; logic, searching, observation, and pattern recognition. With the reduced light we found the searching to be quite tricky, and this really came back to bite us in the arse later on – we only found one of the items we needed by chance, and the other we found later when we’d already spent ten minutes trying to solve the puzzle.
GM/CLUE SYSTEM
The clue system was a bit odd in The Dragon Room, but it worked. There was a TV which was made to look like part of the story (I think?) and on it was an Excel document that Alex could type clues into. The screen had some other information on it but it was easy enough to see when clues were coming through.
Unlike the other games we played at this venue, there was no timer in the room. Ok, that’s not strictly true. There was an hourglass that we had to turn once we entered the room and this was to give us a rough indication of how long we had left.
ANYTHING ELSE
For a room called ‘The Dragon Room’, it felt like it was lacking something, and I think that would probably be a dragon. Two big puzzles slowed down the game for us and kinda killed the buzz, up until that point we were enjoying it, then it just became a bit frustrating.
Success / Failure
Final Rating:
Operation | |
Puzzles | |
Room Design | |
GM/Clues | |
Excitement |
Team: 5 players – escaped in 37:03
Address: 5 Chain Ln, Newport PO30 5QA
Website: https://www.random-rooms.co.uk/
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