An Afternoon in an Escape Room Game (clueQuest, London)

clueQuest is a live escape game designed for three to five people to take part at a time to escape a locked room. These games encourage visitors to use teamwork in order to piece together the clues to allow them to escape the room. There are currently two games on offer (Plan 52 and Operation BlackSheep) with another one opening soon. Booking in advance is essential for weekends and peak times, and I booked in the three of us nearly four months in advance to secure the date that we had in mind. (I can see that about six weeks in advance is enough time for a Saturday, and availability on Sundays and other days is easier to book.)

We were booked for Plan 52, which is the first quiz. The quiz stories do go in an order, but you don't necessarily need to follow it. Unfortunately, we were called on the morning and told that somehow they had over-booked the Plan 52 rooms. They gave me a free voucher for a free game for up to five people to use and booked us in to trial the new 'Revenge of the Sheep' game that will be launched soon.

I was told over the phone that 'Revenge of the Sheep' is more technical and not a linear game. It's actually not too technical and you're not expected to do any programming. We found it fairly easy, but there were some points we fed back to improve based on complete newbies to this style of game. 

I cannot give too much about the game away as I don't want to spoil it, but it involves being locked in a room and having to locate clues in order to escape the room. Ours was to deactivate the "sheep mutator" as the evil sheep was turning humans into sheep, so the objective was not about escaping. 

We got out with about two and a half minutes (out of an hour) to spare, and we were being watched on camera and listened to so we could be led in the right direction, so help was on hand for us for a couple of the tricky areas. At the end, photographs were taken and we received free magnets with our photographs in the venue and signed the guest book.

We actually did have a lot of fun, and we are looking forward to returning in the next few months to complete the Plan 52 with additional friends. I recommend it as an activity with friends, hen or stag 'dos', or team-building events with colleagues.