Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough

Hands holding a question mark and an exclamation markHere’s a treat, and hopefully it might get some discussion going. This site is proud to feature a guest post by Ed Roberts, proprietor of Breakout Manchester. Breakout Manchester is one of the busiest and most popular sites in the country and Ed has travelled extensively, playing games around the country for research purposes (and because he, like everyone else, is a massive fan). Here is a starting-point for a possible ranking table of different games’ difficulties; if you agree or disagree with his rankings, please share your opinions in the comments. Different people will find different things difficult, of course, but if there’s any consensus of opinion, then this would be useful for people deliberately looking for a relatively hard or relatively easy game. Thank you so much, Ed, and take it away!


So I’ve played a fair few escape games. Here in my opinion is how they rank from hardest to easiest. This is no indication of which games are good or bad; an easy game may be great, so may a hard game. Likewise an easy game may be awful as may a hard one. This is also based on nothing more than my personal opinion.

I’ve never played the Scottish, Bath, Bournemouth, Cryptopia, or Irish offerings so I can’t comment on these. I’ve also ranked the Breakout game rooms for where I believe they would sit. You will also notice some games I escaped from are higher up the lists than some other I didn’t escape from, for two reasons: some of the people I was with are better at these games than others – and, as with any game, sometimes there are good performances and other days bad performances.

7 thoughts on “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”

  1. My feelings are similar of the stuff I’ve done. I’d switch the two ClueQuest rooms around though, Operation Blacksheep is pretty tough, it’d only been open a few weeks when we did it but they said the escape rate was about 30%. We found Plan 52 easier, though we did that at the old site and I don’t know how much it has changed.

    Didn’t do Triads at Keyhunter but have done Double Crossing and found it pretty simple too:

    Escape Rooms – Pharoah’s Chamber – got out technically two seconds late, but the guy forgot to put one thing in the room so we lost ten seconds early on, so I call that a win.
    Cluequest – Operation Black Sheep – Made it with seconds to spare
    Cluequest – Plan 52 – escaped
    Hint Hunt – Zen Room – Escaped with a few minutes to spare
    Hint Hunt – John Monroe – To some extent this applies to both Hint Hunt rooms, but especially John Monroe, I’m fairly sure it’s impossible without hints as there are some logical leaps that seem impossible to make.
    EscapeHunt – Kidnapping in the Living room – did this just today, fairly easy, albeit some logical leaps that seem to need clues. Slightly annoyed/disappointed as we hit the final puzzle with about 20 minutes to spare and they just called us and outright told us the answer before we’d even tried to figure it out.
    Keyhunter – Double Crossing – Escaped with no hints, 3rd best time (about 35 mins)
    Keyhunter – Red Curse – Escaped with no hints, spent about 20 minutes failing to notice something obvious else we’d have been much quicker.

  2. I visited Dungeon of Doom on Friday. We were told that only one group has escaped it so far and we came the closest to becoming the second (though they could say that to everyone!). Ostensibly we were only two or three puzzles away from getting out, but of course you never know. In terms of difficulty it was on a completely different plane to Madchester, which was my only experience before. I’m obviously keen to get a few more notches on the proverbial belt before making more comparisons, but wow, it was tough.

    Having said that, really enjoyable experience, and the team at Clue HQ were lovely. Highly recommended to those looking for a challenge.

  3. Bragging on his behalf, ClueHQ’s Dungeon of Doom has finally had a second team of winners, and one of the winners is Phil who wrote for this site. Phil and team are very very very good. They were the second team to escape Bunker 38 and the second team to escape the Dungeon of Doom, but they might have been the first team to escape both, if you see what I mean!

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