Breakout Liverpool – The Facility

The Story:
You arrive at an unknown location for a once in a lifetime opportunity; a conference held by the critically acclaimed, Dr. Andrews. His work is widely known throughout the research circles, but he has remained hidden in the shadows for years. What you don’t know, is that Dr. Andrews has gone mad, creating a string of tests that have gone disastrously wrong. He has brought you here for his final experiment. You have one hour to escape his maze of tricks and games, before a deadly virus kills you all. 

This was the first opportunity I’d had to use my Escape Game Card since I’d bought it, so at Breakout Liverpool we’d grabbed ourselves a 10% discount. It only cost £10, so with two or three uses it’ll have paid for itself – but, this is starting to sound a bit like an advert, so let’s move on…

One thing to note about The Facility, is that it required one of our team to play the part of the initial captee. While this person was certainly integral in moving the room on, they missed out on a few of the puzzles at the start. On the plus side, once they were released it was a fresh pair of eyes to potentially point out any blatantly obvious things that we’d overlooked as we often do.

The room had quite dark decor and was quite dimly lit with a couple of stronger light sources in places, but a decent quality torch was also provided so things such as entering codes into locks weren’t a problem.

There were a couple of immediately solvable things to get us started, not actually puzzles, more observations but it did mean we felt as though we were making progress straight away. This is something we always appreciate as it starts us off in a more positive frame of mind.

Other puzzles we found to be a good variation of logic, observation, and one particular one which was a bit ‘try it and see’. Not sure if we used the correct method for this or whether we stumbled through with dumb luck but whatever it was worked!

We were nearly caught out in a couple of places, as there were a few bits where elements of puzzles had a second use. We’re frequently in the mindset of putting things mentally into the ‘used’ pile once they’ve served a purpose, even though this isn’t a hard and fast Escape Room rule. It really should have been a little more obvious to us here that this wasn’t the case though as there was only one thing it could have been referring to.

The Facility is everything I’ve come to expect from Breakout – a well themed and constructed room, a good variety of puzzles, and staff that are on the ball and can gauge when clues are needed. This all adds up to a great experience.