Breakout Chester – Disturbed

The Story:
Your colleague, and friend, PC Richards has been missing for over a week. His last known location is an old abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town which he had gone to investigate one night after work. His obsession with a closed kidnapping case had left him paranoid and wanting to investigate more.

You decide to go to the abandoned warehouse to see if you can find any clues as to where he may have gone. You come across a gruesome crime scene. You have 60 minutes, whilst the tech team have the alarms disabled, to investigate and discover the fate of your friend.

The ‘Killer’s Hideout’ scenario seems to be a fairly popular one amongst Escape Rooms, with 3 or 4 of the rooms at Breakout Chester alone fitting loosely into this category. It’s easy to see why though, as the setting lends itself perfectly to the idea of being trapped in a room against a ticking clock.

If you’ve ever seen Dexter then I’d describe the theming of Disturbed as being a bit like one of his kill rooms, complete with plastic sheeting on the walls to stop the blood getting everywhere, though that probably makes it sounds a bit more gruesome than it actually is.

As usual, we got stumped on probably the easiest thing in the room, which was one of the first things we spotted and one of the last things we solved. Mental note… remember on word padlocks, there’s sometimes a blank… doh! Other than that we sailed through the first part quite quickly.

The second area proved to be a bit trickier with what appeared to be a bit of an information overload to start with, though the bulk was thankfully just decoration. One thing to note here is that we’ve got very used to the idea of ‘one item, one use’ which, while never explicitly stated anywhere that I’ve seen, it always seems to be the practice. This very nearly caught us out here, but thankfully Mr Carrot tried something on the off chance which turned out to work. Could have been stuck there a while (or at least until the next clue) on that one.

Eventually we were down to the last few locks, with the ‘easy’ one from the very start of the room giving us access to the final stretch. I’m not sure if we missed a couple of pieces of the puzzle on the very last bit, but we had sussed out what we needed before we’d actually completed what we were doing.

There were a couple of bits as we went along that we got clues for that had us thinking ‘eh?’, but on reflection it did all make sense. I think we were just a bit slow off the mark with some of it, but then it is one of their harder rooms, and we are generally a bit pants at these things most of the time.

Great room though, loved it.