I enjoy the immersive and active experiences that escape rooms offer, and Breakin’ Escape, located in Holloway Road, ranks highly from a production perspective. All the rooms have a movie or well known fiction type theme and are well decorated to emphasise this.
On entering Breakin’, you are seated in a very spacious lobby area with small lockers to put coats and bags in. The briefings were very general and obviously standard form. We had our briefing with another group starting at a similar time though we were doing different rooms.
Background for The Flying Dutchman: You were one of the pirates that stole from Jones’ locker, but you were left behind when the Dutchman’s crew discovered you. Now you must find your way within the ship and manage to escape before the time runs out and you become part of Davy Jones’ undead crew… forever!
The room is described as one of the easier rooms, and although the interior could be considered scary (there’s skeletons – it’s a pirate ship after all), I think this is a suitable room for beginners especially if taking kids along.
The decor including skeleton, ships wheel, wood, rope, and various other props really make you feel like you are in the bowels of a ghost ship. The room is straightforward with searching around for key items which allows the group to progress easily and putting things where they need to be. The clues follow each other and solving does follow a straightforward route – which lead to us reaching a bottleneck with two of the puzzles because there was nothing else left to find in the room. I have only done two of the Breakin’ rooms (the other being Fast and Furious themed Heist Plan), which both have similar puzzles (think Crystal Maze style) which unfortunately does not really work well with large groups, as only two or three max people can really be involved and no progress can be made in the room until these are solved (meaning the rest are just watching, as we were). Also, this challenge really does have potential to eat up time in the room, because it is very skill (and maybe some luck) based.
In the end we escaped with 15 mins 15 seconds to go. Even with the frustration of that particular puzzle, we did enjoy the room, the different puzzles and mix of lock mechanisms. When you’re standing in the lobby of rooms, each door looks so intriguing. I can not wait to try other rooms they have!
The room prices are in the £16 – £30 per person range, dependent on the number of people and timings, and they do sometimes have offers on Groupon (or similar) .
Check the rooms out here -> Breakin’ Escape Rooms .
