GamEscape Liverpool – Prison Cell

The Story:
You have been locked up for a crime you did not commit! You are in lockdown, where many prisoners of the inescapable prison have tried, and ultimately FAILED to escape, there is a rumour that one inmate has successfully escaped.

They left many clues, use the clues, solve the puzzles and become the first (officially) to escape before the warden comes back and shuts you in FOREVER.

You have 1 hour!

To me personally, rooms based around escaping from a prison/jail cell are the absolute foundation of the hobby (Pastime? Activity? Sport? Obsession? – What are they actually classed as?).

Escape. Room.

Doesn’t get much clearer than that really, so as much as I admire and love the various themes and inventiveness of many of the rooms I’ve done, it’s always nice to tackle a ‘back to basics’ type scenario now and again, and the room they’ve adapted at GamEscape for Prison Cell is ideal for this, as it’s down in the basement which means proper good solid walls and acoustics that feel right.

The room is split between the cell itself behind bars, and a guard station, both of which are decorated accordingly.

I feel we got off to a flying start in this room and soon opened up access to the full area, but where we then went wrong was making a very silly and basic error… we’d found a key early on and mistaken mentally labelled it as ‘used’ which later meant we spent ages looking for another key to open a padlock. It wasn’t until we were given a clue (which this time was via TV screen) that it finally clicked and we had to go searching back through our ‘used’ pile and work out which it was! Kicked ourselves for that one.

One thing I found that this room had in common with the previous room we’d done here, Golden Cage, is that there was definitely more thorough searching needed than we were used to, going as far as dismantling a piece of furniture to a certain extent!

I’d say that the majority of the room made perfect sense, though we were thrown slightly by an instruction that a specific item should be used three times. We interpreted it one way which meant we had used it three times, but it turns out that the three times we used it only counted as one time… if that makes sense. There were actually another two completely different uses for it after that. I’m sure with more time we’d have eventually tried it somewhere else, but sadly we ran out of time…