Breakout Liverpool – Wanted (Cowboys)
Room #021
Venue: Breakout Liverpool
Room: Wanted (Cowboys)
The Team: TDM, Mr Carrot
Date: 05/11/2017
We hadn’t been to Breakout Liverpool for a while, but we’d been planning to do Wanted there for ages as we loved the idea of good Cowboy themed room, and the intention was that we’d save it for a special occasion.
As it turns out, we got tired of waiting and just ‘Wanted’ to do it (see what I did there)… and so we decided that bonfire night would be that special occasion because fireworks and Cowboys go so well together, probably…
The Story:
Wanted is a wild west themed room. Your quest in the room is to escape but you have two choices and ways to escape. Which side will you take, will you save the day as a cowboy or an Indian? Depending on your choice you will face different tasks and puzzles to complete. Which path will you take?
This room can be set up in two ways – either you play ‘Cowboys’, in which you are limited to one side of the room and have a set task to perform (escape from the saloon you’ve been locked in before the Sheriff gets back), or ‘Outlaws’, in which you use the other side of the room and have a different goal (which I’m not sure of as we’ve not played that yet)!
You’ll notice I said Outlaws and not Indians as that’s how our host described it to us during the briefing. I think it’s having a slight rebranding of sorts as ‘Indians’ is now considered to be culturally insensitive. The website hasn’t been updated to reflect this yet though, hence the description in the ‘story’ section above.
We chose to play the Cowboys option, and found ourselves behind the bar of the saloon which was themed appropriately complete with a working piano. We had a quick tinkle on that, then started off with a mix of riddles, maths, searching, and trying to put two and two together to get five. Yes, our usual fails at the embarrassingly simple stuff wasted us loads of time here, and once we’d finally cracked it and reached the next area, we once again got stuck on something glaringly obvious.
One thing that’s always in my head in rooms, is that if objects are positioned in a certain way when you find them but are then subsequently moved and mixed up by the players, then the puzzle must still be solveable. If this isn’t the case then that’s bad design. Because of this we discounted some of the objects we encountered for a while and just gave them a cursory glance, and it wasn’t until some pretty direct clues (via a TV screen) that we checked them more thoroughly to find we’d missed the most basic, but very effective thing.
Sometimes the simplest solution really is the answer!
From here it was plain sailing with the final few bits neatly falling into place quickly, and our armed escape blasting our way out of the saloon following (along with another quick piano tinkle).
Really fun room, with the added bonus of we can revisit for the other story. Looking forward to it already.
