More and more news

breaking-newsMore and more short news stories at the moment; sadly, they can’t all be longer pieces. Eyes down for a full house.

  • Episode four of Race to Escape was broadcast on Saturday night and has made its way to illicit video-sharing sites already. (There are only six episodes in this series, but so much difference from epsiode to episode; treasure them before they’re gone.) This episode is perhaps the most so of the series to date in a room that looks like it would be tremendous fun to have played. The aforementioned illicit video-sharing sites don’t make it easy – there are doubtless plenty of adverts (noisy pop-unders and the like, maybe worse) – but here’s this week’s link to a list of sites. Megavideoz was the starting-point used here once again.
  • Less than two and a half days to go in the Enigma Quests Kickstarter and less than two and a half hundred pounds required for the project to fund. It’s looking promising, but there’s always more that can be done and those early bird prices look attractive.
  • Edinburgh’s the place to be for exit game excitement while the Fringe is in progress. Locked In Edinburgh have done extremely well before their temporary hiatus starts tomorrow; while the intention was to hold a short run before the venue would be used for a Festival performance, it has proved so successful that it’s now taking bookings for a permanent run from the same address from Tuesday 8th September onwards. Excellent news! The game is set in a disused small animal hospital; unusually, it is a dog-friendly venue, so do bring your dogs along and see if they can sniff out the secrets.
  • The top five entries in the current version of TripAdvisor’s Fun and Games in Edinburgh chart, at time of writing, are all exit games. Great work all round and well worth celebrating!
  • Elsewhere in Edinburgh, comedian Alex Horne and team didn’t have to say “We Need Answers” as they demonstrated that they could answer yes at Can You Escape, and husband-and-wife global medal-winning judoka (? judokas? judokae? Judo superstars, anyhow) Euan Burton MBE and Gemma Gibbons both enjoyed tying Dr. Knox’s Enigma in knots.
  • The stars aren’t just coming out in Edinburgh; The Escape Room of Manchester’s recent Open Night included an appearance by two Hollyoaks actors – but no indication whether they escaped their game or not!
  • Clue HQ of Warrington have launched their fourth game, The Teleporter. In it, the anagrammatic Professor Errol Tepet was a recluse and came up with a number of different inventions during his life time. Not much is known about this device. Nobody knows how he came up with The Teleporter or even if it actually exists – some say it’s just a myth. It probably doesn’t work, but do you fancy a look around? If you’ve played any of their other games before, then you very probably do!
  • CNBC have some rather lovely Time Run clips in a piece on the genre; pity they’ve got a couple of names very slightly wrong, but you can’t have everything!

Mid-August news round-up

News round-up

Who’s a lucky bug? Someone who has just met the brilliant and charming brain behind escaping.sg and its sibling blogs, all full of excellent writing and even better thought behind them, on a trip to London from (as the domain suggests) Singapore. The same lucky bug is off to see friends in Wales this weekend, hurrah!

Here are some quick stories to keep you going for now:

  • Exit Games UK loves stories about proposals at exit games, of which there have been at least… ooh, three that spring to mind. However, a recent one at Dr. Knox’s Enigma of Edinburgh attracted media attention. Game principal Jonathan Dowie, according to STV, “is so confident of the game’s ability to test the compatibility of life partners, he has promised the couple free entry on every anniversary date to come“, which is extremely cute. Congratulations, and many, many games in the years to come, to the happy couple!
  • Following up on a recent story, Code to Exit of Altrincham recently made a post to Facebook featuring this rather handsome trophy, awarded to the team with the quickest escape each month. There are pitfalls in encouraging competition too much, but that is done very tastefully, and this site can imagine some of the usual suspects getting very excited about the prospect.
  • Breakout Liverpool are rather excited about their new fifth room and sixth game. In The Facility, the story goes that “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 room has a horror theme and is not suitable for players under 16. Considering what the Breakout gang have been known to get up to in order to spice Hallowe’en games up, they’re not kidding.
  • The Metro free newspaper and the Jeep Renegade are organising a free draw where the prize is to take part in an Art Heist experience in Manchester on Saturday 5th September. (You have to make your own way there.) The most relevant part is that the experience itself is being organised by CoLab Theatre, responsible for Fifth Column, as discussed last year.
  • Lastly, the Enigma Quests crowdfunding campaign has caught the attention of Time Out London and others, and the game’s first Quest is now practically 70% funded with seven days to go. The beta-tester and Super Early Bird slots have all gone, but the Early Bird prices still look attractive, and the game looks like one of a kind!

The news spirals out of control

news-spiralMany news stories that have been left untamed for far too long because of DASHmania:

  • This site has never seen quite so many different exit games, up and down the country, excited about the same thing as they have been about the forthcoming The Crystal Maze Live. Look for the crowdfunding campaign to start this weekend, with all the usual caveats about crowdfunding campaigns. This site became even more encouraged when a friend pointed out that @deanjrodgers, key within the critically acclaimed Time Run, will be producing the project.
  • Rather less far away, and also the result of a successful crowdfunding campaign, Enigma Escape of London has announced an opening date of 18th July and a handsome 25% discount if you book by midnight on 17th August. Well worth considering!
  • Some other sites in London are all flourishing: Agent November announced its largest corporate booking yet, with groups enjoying all three of its games in a single day, Mystery Cube has seen its hundredth group play and Mystery Squad has launched a second case, The Ghost of Lord Holland; this isn’t aimed at the usual sizes of groups but is, instead, aimed at groups of 20 to 40 who all want to play together.
  • In Edinburgh, Dr. Knox’s Enigma has three local competitors and all three have been extremely complimentary on Twitter about it; additionally, the game has earned coverage from STV.
  • Also in Edinburgh, an exciting-sounding special offer promotion has been announced between Escape and the local branch of the Hard Rock Cafe; £32/person (except Saturdays) gets you both entrance to one of Escape’s three games and a meal from the Hard Rock Cafe’s Gold Menu. Sounds like two parts of a very good night!

Mid-May Newsroom

The NewsroomThe Newsroom has the news from the rooms, hot off the presses.

This site has been following the progress of Dr. Knox’s Enigma of Edinburgh. It’s uncertain when the location opened and its proprietor has not replied to a couple of enquiries to this regard. Nevertheless, the TripAdvisor reviews started on 26th April, so opening can have been no later than that and the map has been updated to show them open. Early reviews are impressive – and, even more telling still, two other location owners in Edinburgh have tweeted about how much they enjoyed their game there. What more could you ask for?

The Escape Room of Manchester have announced something hugely exciting on their Facebook: “We are very proud to announce that we will be opening 6 new stores in the UK, 6 Locations in Europe and 8 Locations in the Middle East! Watch this space for the locations to be revealed!” The location has made a very fast start in Manchester; fingers crossed that other branches can do just as well. There are no updates as to potential UK whereabouts on the Escape Room International site that have not been there for some time, though second-hand information points to the potential for escape rooms to come to new towns in the UK. That’s sufficiently vague.

Puzzle Break of Seattle have launched an exit game on the Anthem of the Seas cruise liner that sails from Southampton during the summer, as previously discussed, and early indications are that it’s being very well received. Cruise Critic were wowed and the fan Royal Caribbean Blog have pictures.

As for passengers on the ship: the boat, still on its first few voyages, has got generally very good but somewhat mixed reviews. Perhaps this is due to teething troubles while things are so new, perhaps this is because the variety of offerings on board are so different to seasoned cruisers’ expectations; in one case, perhaps it’s because the passenger had his suitcase dropped overboard. (The crew rescued the case and washed the clothes, but the iPad and hair straighteners therein were a matter for the insurers.) However, Puzzle Break on the ship has received nothing but standout positive comments in reviews at CruiseCritic and at cruise.co.uk as well.

Any word from Make A Break of Manchester recently? Their booking page leads to a dead end and their Facebook page seems to have gone as well. If you can’t book to play at a site then is it really still in business? Perhaps they’re upgrading their game, perhaps not. One to keep an eye on.

And finally: perhaps it’s not just exit games that have hidden items to find!

Coming soon to Edinburgh: some local history

Edinburgh CastleThis site is always a fan of exit games that make themselves distinctive by playing up to their local roots. Some cities are better-suited to this than others. Edinburgh is extremely well-suited, with some particularly grisly tales about the Burke and Hare murders where the titular pair were associated with (and one of them confessed to) something like sixteen nineteenth-century killings, supplying the bodies to anatomy lecturer Dr. Robert Knox. Plenty of source material ripe for adaptation.

Dr. Knox’s Enigma is a site coming soon to Edinburgh which will feature two different games based on the same incidents. The site is in a building on a hill; start at the Royal Mile and take a series of steps down the Castle Rock to a lower street, and the location is half-way down the flight of steps. The first game, Wilson’s Revenge, refers specifically to the 1828 murder of an 18-year-old man with a distinctive limp and pronounced mental health issues; two parallel rooms will be made available. Booking is open now for dates from Monday 9th March onwards. Two more rooms will be made available later, entitled The Barclay Collection, referring to the anatomist John Barclay who offered Knox a partnership in his anatomy school. Possibly not one for the squeamish!

However, launching before then, Escape of Edinburgh will be changing one of their Classic Live Escape rooms into a room that they are entitling The Darker Side of Edinburgh, drawing not only upon Burke and Hare but also, according to their recent Facebook post, upon Deacon Brodie, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There’s surely enough source material to support different interpretations and focuses; this site looks forward to learning how different games interpret different parts of the canon and how the interpretations compare. This game is set to launch on Thursday 26th February.

All of which will make Edinburgh the first city within the UK, outside London, to host four different sites, featuring at least six different games but set to grow to at least nine. It’s an exciting place to be!