Breakout Liverpool – Classified
Venue: Breakout Liverpool
Room: Classified
The Team: TDM, Mr Carrot, JM
Date: 25/08/2018
Still glowing in a slightly smug yet ‘we can’t quite believe it’ manner from our surprisingly speedy success in The Detective Office, we moved onto our second room of the evening – Classified. We’d heard from a couple of people that this one was quite a toughie, so we tried to ready ourselves by psyching ourselves up into a spy frame of mind… though we were probably feeling a bit more Johnny English than James Bond.
The Story:
The classified room sees players sitting their final entrance exam to become a secret agent. You must escape from the room to pass the exam. This is Breakout’s most explosive and technologically advanced room yet! Think James Bond, Jack Bauer and Lara Croft. Classified is the prequel to Sabotage.
It’s interesting to note that as the story states, the objective for the room is literally to escape from it. A lot of places we’ve played build a story which introduces an element of peril behind the reason why you have to escape (such as you’ve been kidnapped, or you’re in a killer’s lair and they’re on their way back), but Classified’s whole point is that the room has been built for you to escape from as a test… and what a fun test it was.
One of the first things we noticed on entering is just what a large and open space the room is. I think nearly everything we needed to interact with was placed around the walls leaving us plenty of room to spread out for our initial search.
You have to collect a series of objects which then enable you to work out a code to escape. The order isn’t really linear as you could attack the puzzles in any order as you encountered them, though you may have occasionally needed to find a few items first. This meant that we always had something on the go, even if we weren’t quite sure what it was to begin with.
There were a few easy things just lying around waiting to be found to start us off, which progressed into a variety of puzzles – no real theme to them as it seemed a rather deliberate mix to throw as many different types as possible at us, and it was nice to encounter a few practical bits of tech we had to use.
We were stumped a little at one point as we’d found an item that we hadn’t actually found a use for but which definitely looked like we should have to, but we were told later that we’d actually managed to bypass it (though I’m guessing if we had used it it would have sped us up a little), but in the end we managed a pretty respectable time anyway.
