cq ORIGENES is the latest venture from the well established clueQuest escape room company. Having tried three of their previous rooms, which were all suitably impressive from a props and puzzles perspective, I couldn’t wait to try their newest release, courtesy of an invite from lovepopupslondon.
We are back with the familiar faces of Mr. Q and Professor BlackSheep, and with this new room we got to learn a little bit more about them. An origin story filled with genetic experiments!
As with the previous visits, we ended up in the clueQuest lounge area waiting for the rest of the team to arrive. clueQuest have a large number of rooms (multiple copies of each), so there are usually a few groups either just finishing or about to start like us.
We had Rowen providing mission support and briefed us on why they needed help from the secret agents (us!), giving us some important instructions that we definitely needed to remember in the room.
Our Mission Brief:
In order to stop the Professor from breaching our firewall, you and your team will have to access Mr Q’s old base. The only way in, however, is to shrink down to the size of a mouse with the help of the Shrink’o’Mat.
Shrink-O-Mat
Word of caution, agents: the technology you’ll be exposed to is…a bit unstable and still experimental. You’ll have only 60 minutes to counteract the cyber attack and secure the mainframe before the Shrink’o’Mat’s effect wears off and things get messy.
Upon entering the room, it became clearer what the information given by Rowen was for, though I do wonder if we had mixed it up whether things would have still worked. The room had a sci-fi industrial warehouse type feel that allowed everyone in the team to be involved and immediately immersed you in the mission.
As we are “shrunk down” and move along, this is where you can tell how really well thought out the decorations are and the perspective of the puzzles as we are now viewing things in our new “mouse size”.
The puzzles in the room are new takes on traditional styles, with only one padlock in sight, for which there is a fun twist. There are a number of puzzles where four digit codes are the answer, and if your like our team, any four digit number you see you’ll try. But actually, the method of obtaining those numbers is more innovative and included fun challenges that involved multiple team members. The final rush to escape takes you back to where it all started.
We escaped with 1 minute 55 seconds to go and took on a few clues.
cQ ORIGENES is definitely a great addition to the clueQuest roster and has impressive colourful decoration and some innovative puzzles. If you are new to escape rooms this may be a bit tricky as your first one, but it will definitely impress and keep you hooked on escape rooms.
Find out more information clueQuest
