Escape Room Preston – The Mummy

After stuffing our faces with a Christmas morning breakfast of Travelodge‘s finest, we started our journey back southward from the Lake District. Our festive Escape Room fun wasn’t over yet though, as we’d found somewhere open on Christmas Day! Escape Room Preston was our next destination, where we were happy to have found a room with an Egyptian theme (which we’re always suckers for).

Time for us to don our Santa hats once again to take on The Mummy…

The Story:
Archeologists have made the discovery that would change the course of Egyptian history. They have acquired proof that one of the Pharaohs tombs contains the secrets of immortality. A series of mystical methods that grants delayed aging, the very same method adopted by Queen Cleopatra to grant her a mighty reign as the final Pharaoh of Egypt.

Countless efforts by wealthy adventurers have been fruitless in finding this tomb. However, your rag-tag team of archeologists has come across a confidential piece of information on to the whereabouts of this secret tomb. Enter the tomb of Thutmosis; Pharaoh of the Old Kingdom and High Priest to Horus, God of The Sky. Thutmosis was known for his expansive knowledge of sorcery and dark magic, and it seems that his secrets were buried in his tomb with him; including the secret to immortality.

However, leading up to the event of his demise and mummification, he deviously plotted out that his tomb will be crafted with a slew of mischievous puzzles to trap any wandering adventurers such as yourself. You must lead your team into his tomb, acquire all his evil secrets, and successfully escape within 60 minutes or be trapped inside for all eternity and suffer Thutmosis’ wrath!

Escape Room Preston is one of the larger Escape Room venues that I’ve been to. As well as hosting six different rooms, it also houses a LaserQuest game, which I believe a couple of the franchise’s other locations also do. The reception is appropriately large for a place of this size and features a fair bit of glass panelling giving the place a very open feel.

One of the first things we noticed and loved about the place was the grafitti style artwork which decorated the outside of each of the different rooms. All very different, but with a single style running through them and very nicely done. A huge screaming Mummy on one of the walls gave us a small hint as to where we’d be heading into.

Our host gave us our briefing inside the room and explained the clue system to us, which comprised of a light switch on the wall. She explained that once we pressed the switch, she’d come in and help us with whatever we were stuck on. We could take as many clues as we needed, but I think we only had a limited number if we wanted a place on the leaderboard* (see footnote).

I thought I’d hate this system, and while there’s no doubt that I much prefer clues coming in via a screen or speaker when the host sees we’re struggling, I found this wasn’t too bad. Yes, it breaks the immersion, but a face to face means you can be quite specific in what you ask.

The Egyptian theming of the room was great, though it was maybe a little too ‘atmospherically lit’ for our eyes. We ended up having to take any items or puzzles we found to the centre where the brightest white light was located. We struggled on one puzzle which I kicked myself for later as I’d seen it before but had a total mind blank, but we sailed through the rest of the first part.

One bit worth noting was something where I believe it would have been much easier had there been three of us. There may have been some kind of implement in the room we could have used to help us, but if there was then we completely missed it. As it happens I ended up taking off one of my shoes and socks and asking Mr Carrot to touch my foot, which he REALLY didn’t want to do. He has kindly illustrated the moment for me…

‘TOUCH IT, TOUCH MY FOOT’ I was shouting at him, but he was just demanding to know where the bleach was for afterwards. No, we hadn’t gone mad, this was our solution to one of the puzzles, and when Mr Carrot finally and reluctantly capitulated, it worked!

Once unlocked, we found the second part of the room was even more ‘atmospherically lit’ which did actually cause us a few problems. I think the lights may have even been coloured which made it very difficult to distinguish between green and blue which at one point it became necessary to do.

We found ourselves taking clues back through to the first area so we could read them in the brighter white light again, but there were also some larger items where it wasn’t really practical to do this. We ended up having to flick the switch to take a clue, but even once we knew what to do and exactly what it was that we’d missed in the semi darkness it still proved quite difficult to see, but a little trial and error sorted it out.

Overall I think we made really good time in the end, for us anyway. We probably could have shaved another 5 or 6 minutes off, but we became hopelessly bewildered by the final bit. This was probably one of the most straightforward and most obvious things the whole room, but true to form we managed to faff about trying everything but the right thing on an easy bit.

To be fair, we’d spotted the ‘right thing’ but had wrongly assumed it was part of something else that we didn’t want to be directing our focus onto. That will probably make some kind of cryptic sense if you’ve done the room, but we ended up asking for another clue and found ourselves somewhat embarrassed by the obvious solution.

I claim our crapness at this point was caused by us trying to be good boys and to not damage stuff, and that’s the answer I’m sticking with! Yes.

We found The Mummy was a lot of fun if a little on the easy side (it is their easiest room, and if we’re saying that it MUST be easy). Yes, we took a couple of clues, but one of these was more because of the lighting than anything. We actually both had torches in our pockets the whole time, but I never know if using them would be considered as cheating so we didn’t use them.

*Footnote
Ha! Like we’ll ever get on one!

Result: Escaped in 42 minutes