Ok, so that is a bit of click-bait title but it works so we’re going to stick with it. Each year, around Christmas, the Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts’ Choice Awards take place (TERPECA for short) and this year they took place on the 18th December.
So what are the TERPECAs? It’s probably easier that this just comes straight from the team behind it:
The Top Escape Rooms Project is an attempt to find the very best escape rooms in the world by leveraging the experience of the most experienced escape room enthusiasts in the world. We serve escape room owners and designers by publicly recognizing their achievements, and we serve our fellow enthusiasts by providing an international bucket list of the best rooms to play.
They use a lot of very complex algorithms to rank games that are nominated for, and voted on, by enthusiasts. In order to be a nominator enthusiasts have to have played over 200 games (we qualified), and in order to vote, more than 50 games have to have been played. For a room to be eligible for the ranking phase it must have received at least four nominations. This year alone, there were nearly 800 contributors who between them had played over 177,000 games!
You can see the full list of the top 50 winners by visiting the Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts’ Choice Awards site, but we’re just going to focus on the UK entries. Unfortunately no UK game made it into the Top 50, but here are the UK games in the order they finished.
- Loot The Lanes – Pier Pressure (Brighton)
- Daylight Robbery – Cryptology (Nottingham)
- CQorigenes – clueQuest (London)
- Nethercott Manor – Tulleys (Crawley)
- SpellCraft – Tulleys (Crawley)
- Viking – Extremescape (Disley)
- Temple Quest – Clue Cracker (Tunbridge Wells)
- UI-55 – Compendium (Bury)
- The Lost Tomb – Extremescape (Disley)
- Pudding Lane – Time Trap (Reading)
- Curio – Escapologic (Nottingham)
- The Guardian of the Gallery – Want To Escape (Rushden)
- RMS Titanic – Houdini’s (Southampton)
- Ram Raid – Escape Reading (Reading)
- The Legend of Miyalock – Clue HQ (Birmingham)
- Project Delta – AI Escape (London)
- Monuments – Cave Escape (Nottingham)
- The Citadel – Escape Nation (Stafford)
- The Pit – The Escapement (Margate)
- Extinct (Escape from Jurassic Island) – Houdini’s (Southampton)
- The Comms Room – Escape in the Towers (Canterbury)
- Professor Dunstan and the Search for the Ancient Statuette – CoDecode (Swindon)
- Diamond Dogs – Clue Cracker (Tunbridge Wells)
- Battle for Britain – Escape Plan (London)
- Howitz – Escapologic (Nottingham)
- Into the Reliquary – Darkmaster (Crowborough)
- Sub Terra – CoDecode (Swindon)
- Dreamscape – Cryptology (Nottingham)
- Loop – Panic Rooms (Gravesend)
- Pirates of Polaris – The Escapement (Margate)
- Spellbound – Make Your Escape (Derby)
- Secret Studio – Escape in Time (London)
- Revenge of the Sheep – clueQuest (London)
- The Time Machine – Deadlocked (Reading)
- The Enchanted Forest – Break Escape (Loughborough)
We also want to give honourable mention to the only game in the Top 50 that we have played. It’s not in the UK, but if you ever get a chance to get to Los Angeles, then Lab Rat by Hatch Escapes is a must play!
Top Online Games
Currently the TERPECAs also include categories for online games and I’m pleased to say that we’ve played many more of these and the UK had a much better showing here (and we’re hoping to fill in the blanks soon). Here were the Top 10 Online (avatar based) winners;
- Pursuit of the Assassin Artist – Omescape (USA)
- Escape from the Science Lab of Shifting Rules – Scrap (Japan)
- The Keeper and the Fungus Among Us – Headlock Escape Rooms (UK)
- Miss Jezebel Online – 60 Out (USA)
- Virtual Exorcist – Emergency Exit (UK)
- The Beast – Emergency Exit (UK)
- Isolation – Escape Room Melbourne (Australia)
- The Traveler’s Guide to Little Sodaburg – Meridian Adventure Co (USA)
- Showdown – 66 Minuten (Germany)
- Immaterium – Escapologic (UK)*
*We played the in person version of this room so have linked to our review of that.
In Summary
It would have been nice to have seen the UK have some games break into the Top 50, but it wasn’t’ to be. With the world going in and out of lockdown it will be interesting to see what opportunities we get for playing real life games in 2022, but at least we still have the online games.
The TERPECA awards are the pinnacle awards for the escape room industry and congratulations to all companies who not only won, but also got nominated.
Thank you and well done to the team behind the awards too, you have all done an incredible job and the award ceremony was arguably perfect. Straight to the point, no fluff, just focussing on great games and great companies.
[…] the last couple of years we’ve written articles with catchy titles like ‘The Best Escape Rooms in the UK in 2021’, and ‘The Best Escape Rooms in the UK in 2022’, so it was kinda obvious that we’d follow […]