Trapped on an Island

Treasure Map

Being trapped on an island has a long and storied history, so it seems fertile ground for generating escape room themes. Six months ago you’d have been out of luck if you’d wanted to actually play a game on an island, but whether you fancy going as a pair like Robinson Crusoe or a larger group like the Swiss Family Robinson, the local scene has recently expanded. The political geography of the UK and Ireland can be a bit tricky at times, so while this site bills itself as a resource for exit games from the UK and the Republic of Ireland, there are some games which, while technically falling outside that definition, are included here nonetheless.

Shetland

When two sites opened almost next to each other in Inverness, it seemed like it might be tricky to definitively state the location of the most northerly escape room in the UK.  Fortunately, Locked Shetland has now come to our rescue as the undisputed record holder. For an island with a population of about 22,000 and around 65,000 visitors a year, it’s definitely on the smaller side of audiences. It’s probably also the most remote escape room facility in the UK. Indeed, it’s not clear whether its nearest escape room neighbour is even in the UK, with Bergen, Norway being about the same distance as Inverness.

Their opening room is entitled “The Study” and comes with the following description: The professor has spent years of his life looking for the ‘Eye of Egypt’ a magnificent diamond. Finally, after all that time he has found it. You and your team on the other hand have spent ten minutes to get yourselves locked in his study. Now what took him years to find, you’re going to attempt to find in an hour! You and your team have an hour to solve the clues and puzzles to find the jewel and escape the study.

Beta testing took place earlier this month according to their Facebook page and booking is now open.  The game costs £44-72 and can accommodate 2-6 players.

The Isle of Man

At the very end of last year, Exit Strategy quietly arrived on the scene and kept well below the radar for a while. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Exit Strategy on the Isle of Man is, to the best of this site’s knowledge, unrelated to its relatively near neighbour in Liverpool. Unsurprisingly, the Isle of Man venue is located in the capital Douglas, just outside the town centre. On an island that is no stranger to speed, it’s also not surprising to see that they keep a leaderboard of the fastest times in each room, although they’ve deemed number of hints more important than pure speed. There are currently three games available, priced at £16-20pp:

In Prison Break, you’re aiming to rescue your friends from jail: Framed and captured, two of your team mates may never see the light of day again. Can you free them and escape the call before the guard returns. The game requires 3-6 players.

In Police Academy, it’s the end of your training academy. Do you have all the skills required to become part of our crime investigation team. This is your graduation challenge. You have 60 minutes to prove yourself, hone your skills and plan your EXIT STRATEGY. The game accommodates 2-8 players.

In Jewels: Museum Heist you play criminals out to capture a priceless gemstone. The Kelia Dynasty Diamond is on display in our museum. This prized jewel is too tempting to miss. A heist is in order. Can you beat the museum’s security, solve the puzzles, and escape with the gem? The game accommodates 2-8 players.

Portsea Island

If you’re reading this with a blank face, fear not. While you may not have heard of the island itself, you almost certainly know of the city that sits on it: Portsmouth. Yes, if you look carefully on the map, you’ll see there’s a thin stretch of water splitting the centre off from the mainland. Situated on the island, and therefore qualified for mention here, Real Escape UK opened a month or so ago.

Taking advantage of the city’s maritime history, their first room has a nautical theme. Deep within a shipwrecked flagship lies the Captain’s Cabin. The door swings shuts behind you and it’s just you and your team-mates under the deck.

According to interviews, they intend to open up other rooms at the venue in the not too distant future. Price for the current room is £18-21 per person for 3-6 people.

The Isle of Wight

Again, this is slightly old news, but it hasn’t previously been covered on this site. Random Rooms opened in March of this year and offers the inhabitants of and visitors to the Isle of Wight two rooms, both costing £60 for up to six people

In Prisoners’ Room you have been wrongly imprisoned in a far away country; your task is to send an encoded message to Rescue Forces so they locate you and help you escape from “Mountain Prison” while in the Goddess Anuket’s Curse Puzzle Room your task is to find a mysterious gemstone hidden in your great uncle’s study, and prevent it from releasing the Curse of the Egyptian Goddess Anuket at the exact moment of a planetary alignment.

The website points at plans for three more rooms, two of which already have concrete themes: a bank heist and a motel room.

Jersey

We started well north of the mainland, so let’s finish well south. The Escape Tunnel is a new escape game that opened last month on the island of Jersey as part of the Jersey War Tunnels centre. If you’re not familiar with Jersey’s story during the war there’s plenty on the parent site, but it’s clear that the theme for this escape game has been created very much inside the history of that time.

It is 1943 and Chief of Combined Operations, Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, has conceived operation Constellation, an offensive against the Channel Islands. A team of commandos are to land on Jersey and break into Ho8 (Jersey War Tunnels). Your mission, which you will have one hour to execute, will be to find the locations of the newly constructed Fortifications once you have accessed the German Commandant’s Office. You will have to search, identify clues and decipher puzzles to find the locations and uncover the code to unlock the door.

The room costs £15 per person and has space for 4-8 players.

STOP PRESS: Apparently one escape room isn’t enough for Jersey. This site has just learned through Scare Tour UK that Secrets Beneath, a scare attraction on the island, have opened Outbreak, a live actor, multi-room zombie escape game. Do you have what it takes to help save the world from a lethal Zombie virus? The Black Fox Military Corps require help to retrieve the anti virus that will stop the virus from spreading. To complete your mission you and your friends will have to complete mental, physical and psychological tasks to escape each room, and retrieve the hidden elements of the vaccine. The game is already open and costs £18pp for non-exclusive tickets.

Where else?

That, as far as this site is aware, is the full list of exit games currently open on the local islands (other than the British and Irish mainlands themselves, of course). It’s interesting to speculate which would be next though: If this site had to hazard a guess, Anglesey seems the next most likely with a population of nearly 70,000 and high tourist traffic. If Shetland can get one…

Now open in Brixton… but not for long: Oubliette

Oubliette logoThis site has always been rather… reticent to post about Oubliette, which opened in Brixon, south London, in January. The road to Hell is always paved with good intentions; as hinted at, Exit Games UK knew Oubliette’s proprietors, at least a little, before it opened and even volunteered to sand down some of the floors and walls in the building, which it hasn’t done for any other game. (Yet!) Exit Games UK even has a cracking interview with the proprietors while they were getting started which was, at one point, intended to be the “before” part of a “before and after” piece.

When you begin to play our room escape game, you walk through a door and find yourself plunged into New Pelagia, an Orwellian dystopia full of suspense and suspicion. The people here are watched over by the love and grace of JCN, a huge pervasive computer and CCTV network. The government rations and controls everything to keep things tidy – there are rumours that sometimes people get tidied away too.

You are members of the underground resistance movement who are being sent to infiltrate the ((propaganda office at the)) Ministry of Perception and find out what happened to a double agent who has mysteriously disappeared.

It’s a sixty-minute game for teams of up to eight; teams of six are recommended, but a team of three escaped, once. The price is higher than most at £30/player, but you get more for your money than from most rooms. In its months open, the site has received considerable praise from unusual sources, notably in the (mostly computer) game design and review community. Emily Short‘s review discussed the game in a way that this site doesn’t recall an exit game being discussed before:

…when, as a result of puzzle-solving, a new bit of story occurred — and again I’m being intentionally vague here — it generally ramped up the anxiety and threat level. I’m used to story-as-reward in video games, but here there was story-as-punishment. Solve the puzzle quickly? STORY GETS MORE WORRYING. This felt like a pretty natural and pleasurable extension of the existing principles. And it wasn’t as though we were going to stop trying to escape the room in order to avoid having more story bits happen to us!

If you’ve played and enjoyed exit games before, but never had that sort of experience, and if those sorts of descriptions sound like your cup of tea, then there can be few higher recommendations for the originality, intrigue and interest of this game. (On the other hand, if you know you’re lousy with dystopian stories – *raises hand* – then it might set your expectations as a game that might not be for you, and that’s cool too.) Closer to home, the game was reviewed at The Logic Escapes Me, rushing straight to very near the top of the recommendations; it was discussed in the first episode of the Escape from Reality podcast as well.

So why discuss this site now? The latest news is not good: the site is set to close, in its current form, at the end of Saturday 18th June. The Adventure Society shop, used as a framing device for the staging of the game, may also have to go on its next great adventure.

You may be thinking: ‘But I thought you were a permanent Escape Room?’ and yes, so did we. We were all set to sign paperwork to extend our lease by another year, when suddenly the landlord changed his mind. Now we’re staring at a countdown trying to get as much done as possible in the time remaining – which is kinda apt really. (…)

‘Are you going to open up somewhere else?’ We’d like to, but we don’t know, finding a space to move into and installing everything takes time and money, neither of which we have in spades. We may end up just selling off what we can and junking everything else. If you know somewhere we could move to, store things or someone who would buy things, please let us know!

All right. This is very clearly a special game in a busy field, which may very well not be around for long. On the other hand, there may be people for whom a demonstrably, tried-and-tested, game with a unique extent of focus on its story would surely be of interest in a business sense as well as a player sense. The business model for Oubliette is a bit different from that of most other games, and to try to make it fit in a similar box to most other games would be to destroy some of the ways in which it is most attractive. Nevertheless, a game this distinctive and critically acclaimed would be a remarkable addition to any facility, so the countdown is on… in more ways than the usual one.