Escape Room Experience

 

On the 5th of August, our members that are still in Newcastle were treated to escape room experiences at Escape Newcastle.

First Contact

By Adam Crisp

First Contact was based around the Alien and Predator films. Our objective was to find all of the codes to make our way to the final room and escape via space shuttle.

Along the way there were many references to the films in the form of props, sounds and puzzles.

We were handed a walkie-talkie to give us advice along the way, and then entered the first of three rooms to begin our mission. The room contained a map on the wall, a locked chest containing backpacks with puzzles, and a hatch connecting to the next room. It was easy to see we needed to unlock the chest, then the bags, and finally the hatch. After getting off to a flying start, we ran into some issues once we found laser pointers and needed some points of advice through the walkie-talkie. After receiving some hints we progressed through the first room in around 25 minutes, spending 10 minutes on the laser pointers alone. We then unlocked the hatch and crawled through into the second room.

The second room was bigger and darker than the first. This room showed off the bulk of the alien and predator features, and ended with a door locked with a pin code. There were a few simple locks and puzzles to solve to begin the room. The second half of the room was using a UV light to find codes on skulls and writing on the wall. As a team we took a little longer than expected however we really enjoyed snooping around the room with the UV light to discover secret codes and information before we found the final code and entered the code before the door slid open.

The final room was the smallest room and represented our space shuttle. We started by unlocking more simple locks with codes scattered around the room. However, this is where we lost a fair amount of time. We got wrapped up with how little time we had left and forgot to snoop around every corner of the room and missed a few obvious clues around the room. This was our own fault and we lost around 5 minutes on this room alone. With around 50 minutes of the hour complete we solved all our puzzles and entered the pin code for the final challenge and completed the challenge in 50:24.

Overall, we all had a great time completing the escape room and were tested by the puzzles along the way. This was our first experience of an escape room and everyone on the team had a really good time and said they would be more than happy to try another escape room in the future.

Dead Man's Hand

By Rubee Mellon

This escape room was loosely based on the show West World. The storyline of the room was as follows: a spaghetti-western themed amusement park that was entirely ran by robots has had a malfunction that has caused the robots to malfunction. As a result, they have turned violent, kidnapped and murdered the owner of the park, and surrounded you in the park saloon. To escape you must find the severed hand of the park owner to escape the saloon, and subsequently, the park.

When we entered through the saloon doors, we quickly got distracted because we found these cute hats and decided to spend five minutes taking pictures in our lovely new hats (don't do this, as it influences your time and they will let you go back in after you are finished to take photos).

There were also several times we lifted things up and we got a polite message through on the walkie talkie of 'that isn't meant to lift up', so I think we were a bit too rough with the items in the room. 

There were two rooms in total, the first being the main room that contains a bar, poker table and piano, and the second which is much smaller, which contains lockers and the door that you ultimately escape through.

We made a few mistakes that in hindsight were REALLY dumb, but we made it out (alive) with a not-too-shabby time of 46 minutes and 2 seconds (if we had not have spent so long taking pictures then maybe it would have been better). We chose the team name of 'Dyslexic-Goth-Kidney' and felt indeed smug that we had beaten the other team.

Overall we had a great time participating in Dead Man's Hand, and our host Jay was absolutely fantastic and so kind, even when we were being extra dumb.