Exit Games UK has been looking forward to this one for a while. Cambridge is one of the bigger tourist destinations in the country and has long been an obvious venue to host an exit game; work on one has been long under way, with its proprietor long responsible for Play Exit Games (which is much better-programmed than this first-generation old site!) and, more recently, Escape Game Card, among other ventures.
The first game at Cambridge Escape Rooms has a 60-minute time limit and is for teams of 2-6 players. Games start every 90 minutes between 11am and 9:30pm daily, with advance bookings being very strong, particularly at weekends. Full price starts at £44 for a team of two and goes up to £84 for a team of six, but weekday games before 5pm have a £2/player discount.
That first game is Secret of the Tomb, and is the first game in the UK from TRAP (“Team Race Against Puzzles”) of Budapest. TRAP have installed games in 13 other countries around the world; their original Budapest site is, at time of writing, TripAdvisor’s top-rated site in Budapest beating 48 (forty-eight) others to that title. (And that’s just the ones rated on TripAdvisor; dear old daddy exitgames.hu suggests there are 79 in total, though that total may well count two physically distinct halves of a site separately when TripAdvisor does not.)
“Brent Chadwick had a rough childhood. He grew up in the shadow of his mother, Lucille, who was the founder of the ‘Church of the Untemptables’ (COTU). The COTU was a Christian-fundamentalist church in the eighties that preached: ‘Resist all temptations, but if you aren’t able to resist, you still have the chance of salvation if you punish yourselves equal to the sin you have committed.’ So no wonder Brent went crazy and, after his mother died, moved to a hidden room – the very room you are about to enter. This strange place is full of traps. The only way to escape is to find the urn of Lucille’s ashes. If you fail and are still here after an hour, Brent will arrive home and I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when he does.”
Neither would this site. The pedigree is tremendous and the price is attractive, especially if you can play before 5pm on Monday where the discount for holders of an Escape Game Card is so large that it will more than pay for the card in a single visit. What a lucky place Cambridge is!