Escapism Chester – Taken
Venue: Escapism Chester
Room: Taken
The Team: TDM, Mr Carrot
Date: 16/07/2017
This was our first visit to Escapism Chester, and one thing that’s worth noting as an aside is how convenient the parking is, as there’s a car park directly below the building which is currently free after 3pm. The place itself is in a relatively new building, and the reception has a light and airy open plan office like feel, which actually works quite well as you can chat with the friendly staff while you wait and sometimes start the usual safety briefings early so you can jump straight in.
The room we’d selected on this occasion was Taken.
The Story:
Your friends have been taken hostage and time is running out. The kidnappers have given you 60 minutes to meet their demands but you know where they’re hiding. It’s time to take matters into your own hands: can you keep your cool in a daring breakout?
Taken is a pretty solid room with a fairly linear puzzle sequence, along with collecting a few things for a later puzzle along the way. I think it may be a ‘bought in’ room as I believe there are a couple of variations of it around the country according to the Exit Games website. What Escapism Chester have done though, is added a personal touch to it by topping it with a custom made intro video, along with video interludes at various points throughout on the TV screen, through which the clues were also given.
The room was sparsely but well decorated which fitted with the kidnappers lair story, and there was one particular puzzle with some hidden tech which really stood out for us – wasn’t expecting it to work like that but it was great when it did.
I don’t think the room was particularly difficult despite how long it took us, but having said that we definitely did need one major clue which actually turned out to be that we had to check the first thing we’d used again, as we’d missed something obvious. I mean REALLY obvious… an actual physical item that we’d seen then put something back on top of and forgotten about! Always the simple stuff that stumps us!
I mentioned them before, but a special shout out must go to the staff here as they really are some of the nicest and friendliest people we’ve met in Escape Rooms. We’d pop in to just hang around and chat when passing, but I think they’d end up thinking we were weirdos stalking them and call the police on us…
It’s starting to sound like I have a bit of a soft spot for Escapism Chester, and maybe I do, but I’d also like to mention their marketing as they make the effort to do something a bit different with their promo videos. Some of them feature Dave the singing skeleton… Very silly, but funny and obviously a lot of time, love, and effort has been put into something they’re clearly passionate about.
Great venue, and a fun room.
