Stuck in the Riddle: Test Run (Huddersfield)

Points mean prizes!

We’re pitching for a new contract and we need to find the best of the best, so gather your team mates, we’re going to put you through the BizCorp Assessment System and see what score you can get in a frantic hour of puzzle solving!

We’d never been to Huddersfield but had heard about Stuck in the Riddle, and specifically their game ‘TestRun’. I would say we came to Huddersfield just for this game, but there’s also a Brewdog in town so we made sure to stop off and get a stamp for our Brewdog visa (it’s a thing, look it up).

We parked in the multi-story carpark that was just a short walk from the venue, and after collecting our visa stamp, we headed to get Stuck in the Riddle.

As part of our northern mini-weekend away we had teamed up with escape room superstars, Amy and Ian from the escape room blog, Brit of an Escape Habit.

When we arrived we ascended the rather steep staircase and were greeted by our GM, Rob. Rob led us up another steep staircase to a large and oddly empty space. Well empty except for a wheeled trolley table containing an assortment of padlocks.

After receiving the general health and safety briefing in the empty room, Rob then took us down another corridor and stopped at the entrance for TestRun. It was outside this room where we received our mission briefing and possibly the most detailed set of instructions we’ve ever had for an escape room. Fortunately, once we got going everything made sense and became clear very quickly.

So, with our barcode scanners in hand, yes, barcode scanners, we were ready to go!

IMMERSION/ROOM DESIGN

Visually this room isn’t much to look at. There are a lot of plain walls and it has a mostly clinical feel to it – but it is a testing area so that makes sense. The game opens up pretty quickly into other spaces and larger teams will have no issues going for the divide and conquer approach – in fact you very much have to.

The premise of the room is actually quite simple, you see a barcode and you scan it. Each barcode gives you a number of points, and sometimes solving a puzzle will reveal another barcode or give you a code to enter on the central terminal.

It was nice that each team member was given their own barcode scanner to use, and also a notepad for jotting down anything of use. What was also nice was that lighting wasn’t an issue and we could see everything clearly.

What we didn’t realise was that the points for puzzles/barcodes weren’t set, you got more points if you solved them quicker. So some of the early puzzles we solved got us good points, but Liz solved one with just a few seconds left in our game and only got a handful of points.

There were ambient noises being played throughout the game which helped cover the noises of us rushing around in a panic.  A possibly friendly robot also kept us company in the room and chimed in every now and then.

PUZZLES

This game had a lot of puzzles, actually, not a lot of puzzles, it has ALL the puzzles! This really was a massive puzzle fest from start to end and I’m not convinced we ever actually stopped.

The puzzles generally resulted in codes for padlocks or for the terminal, but there was also some tech too. The nice thing was that the control panel told you which puzzles still needed to be solved, and where there were still barcodes to find – although that didn’t stop us scanning some multiple times just to be sure.

Like I said, there were a lot of puzzles in TestRun, some quick wins and some very much longer. Searching, observation, memory, perspective, maths, decoding, audio, colour, pattern recognition, logic – pretty much everything made an appearance.

Being honest, there were one or two puzzles that we didn’t like and perhaps felt a little unfair. It could just be sour grapes because we didn’t solve them in time, but we still weren’t fans, especially as one wasn’t really a puzzle.

GM/CLUE SYSTEM

Rob delivered an enthusiastic and humorous briefing but the star of the show with the clue system was the robot in the corner, I think he was called Spencer, maybe?

Spencer was always on hand to chime in if we needed assistance but equally he was able to mock us too if we were being dim. Rob was also on standby and could feed in audio clues if we needed them.

I’m going to talk about the terminal in this section too as it kinda fits here, maybe. The scanner system was very clever, and tracking everything we had done was very useful. The amount of stats they can pull down from this game is impressive and we could even see how many times we’d scanned one particular barcode (it was a lot).  The aim of the game is to get as high of a score as possible, and yes there is a score board, and yes, Team S2 were topping it when we visited (and after we visited too).

ANYTHING ELSE

The description for this game describes a ‘frantic hour of puzzling’, and that’s exactly what it is. This is a game that will appeal to enthusiasts as the aim is not to get out quickly, but to solve as many puzzles as possible.

Success / Failure

Final Rating:

Team: 4 players – escaped in an hour with around 170k points

Address: 32 Westgate, Huddersfield HD1 1NX

Website: https://www.stuckintheriddle.com/