Overview

Our friends stubbled across Escape Rooms Middlemoor purely by chance on Facebook due to living only 5 minutes down the road. They currently don’t have their own website but they do have a Facebook page where you can call and book a room. They have 3 rooms open, Steampunk and Sweeney Todd (Reviews coming soon) and Peaky Blinders which is the first room we tried with them.

When you arrive at the venue, you easily follow the escape rooms sign through a couple of car parks. The rooms are set up in static caravans and there are plenty of car parking spaces. Reece (the owner) made us all feel very welcome and asked us if we had visited before and after he found out that this was actually our first escape room, he went through all the details and what to expect in the game.

As soon as we walked into the room, you could see that Reece had put a great deal into it to make it feel like a real bar, you quickly forgot you were in a static caravan! None of us had watched Peaky Blinders so I perhaps feel a lot of the details were lost on us but the room really did look smart. The room was lit well enough that we didn’t struggle at any point to complete anything but there were torches if we needed them.

There were a lot of items in the room that kept us occupied although a number of them were just decoration, slightly irritating 

With this being our first room, we really struggled to get into it. No fault at all of the game or the theme but we didn’t expect the game to be so searching. Other puzzles gave you combinations for padlocks and some physical games as well. We did have to ask for a bit of direction a few times due to the number of searching puzzles we ended up lost in. The final puzzle in particular really did frustrate us and by the sounds of other groups that we know have done the room, you normally just stumble upon the answer by chance. If we had stumbled across the answer as quick as others, we would have escaped with plenty of time to spare. Shoulda woulda coulda I know!!

There was plenty to do in the room that enabled us to split up individually and also to work together as a team and I believe if this hadn’t had been our first room, we probably would have escaped as we normally slot into a normal routine but we couldn’t get into it in this room.

There was a TV screen in the room that had the countdown clock on it so we could keep an eye on our time. The screen was also used for giving us clues if we needed them. There weren’t any walkie talkies and Reece explained at the beginning of the game that he would be able to see and hear us so we just had to ask out loud if we needed any help. He did a pretty good job in spotting when we were struggling and popped up clues on the screen when he felt we needed them. The one slight issue we had with the clues on the screen was that we weren’t always aware when something popped up due to no noise/notification of the clue coming on the screen, so if we were heads down focused on something, we sometimes missed the prompts.

In our opinion the clues were a little cryptic as well that sometimes really did confuse us and sometimes put us on a different path that we needed to go on.

Round Up

For a first escape room, we really did enjoy it even though we did not escape. You can see that Reece has put so much into the room and has plans to enhance the other rooms he has. We left the room feeling frustrated as we struggled at times with searching for a lot of items but again I feel this due to it being our first room and a new team.

We enjoyed our first visit to Escape Rooms Middlemoor and has made us go back to complete the set. Definitely give it a go but remember to SEARCH SEARCH SEARCH.

Team: 4 Players 

Time Escaped: N/A

Success/Failed: Failed

Company Details: 

https://www.facebook.com/EscapeRoomsMiddlemoor/