During lockdown, we’re constantly on the look-out for new online experiences to keep us entertained. I managed to find this very reasonably priced virtual escape room from Escape Live. I’d always wanted to tackle an escape room BC (Before Covid) but had never managed to take the plunge… mostly because I was terrified of how awful I’d be at it.
Luckily, this virtual escape room from Escape Live allows up to 6 people to collectively work on the case at the same time, from 6 separate devices. This was great for me, because I needed all the help I could get! I gathered my most intelligent colleagues to make up a full group, and started psyching myself up for some brain-challenging conundrums.
The experience we chose was £25, making it just over £4 per person - not bad for an evening of easy entertainment. The downside is that it works out as much more if you’ve only got 2 people on your team, but due to the fact this particular room is one of the most difficult they sell, I wouldn’t advise such a small team. (Six brains are better than two!)
Something I personally really liked about this was that there was no need to set a date prior to purchase. They sent me a link to forward onto my group, and then we arranged a date and time to best suit us. We set up our own Zoom call, and there was no pressure to be on time and no need to stress about the inevitable technical start up issues.
Once we were all settled, we clicked our link, entered our unique code and clicked ‘begin’. We were automatically greeted by a pre-recorded video of a man in a suit. He was to be our guide for the evening, giving us the low-down and congratulating our good work whenever we (finally) managed to solve a clue. He explained that he was the head of MI5 and that one of their agents had gone rogue, stealing valuable art from around the world. It was our mission to not only find out who he was, but also his exact whereabouts.
After our introduction and explanation of what we needed to do, we were a little flustered, but excited. We spent a good while browsing through all the evidence on the ‘governments secret online portal’ that we had been given access to, in order to find our man.
I don’t want to give too much away about the game itself, but it was off to a great start with a little brain twister involving geography homework, and intensely searching through our evidence for clues. We completed the first challenge in decent time, and our new mate the big boss agent appeared once again to give us the next clue.
All I’ll say from here is that the tasks definitely increased in difficulty, and had us scouring all corners of the internet in the hope that we might find something relevant. The game itself was clever in that is used more than just the one web page, utilising the online aspect to have us visiting external websites, social media profiles and more.
The room took us 1 hour and 5 minutes to crack. This included the videos from the boss man, so we’ll say we did it in under an hour to help our egos.
All in all, this made for a fun hour that felt much longer, and provided something completely unique for my average Thursday evening in lockdown. Despite using a lot of the optional hints available to us, we felt like we’d achieved something at the end of it. If there’s a group of you, I reckon it’s definitely worth splashing out that £4 each!
