Themed escape-the-room type venues have recently been popping up all over the country and have snowballed in their popularity. We therefore obviously had to try one out, and booked Escape Rooms Cardiff. Escape Rooms believe that their tasks are great for team building as they involve working together in a high pressure environment on tasks which are fun and engaging.
After much team deliberation, we decided to take on the task of ‘finding Sherlock’, where your team is taken to the private office of Sherlock Holmes after he has recently gone missing. Your mission is to solve the clues that he has left for his friend and sidekick, Dr Watson. With a difficulty rating of four out of five, and just one hour to find and solve all of the clues, the game was on.
As a team, we went into the task feeling pretty confident. After all, there were five of us so by putting our heads together we would figure it out quickly, surely? But when we walked into the room, our confidence quickly vanished. Sparsely furnished and with the clock ticking loudly, I think it was all of our first instinct to start exploring the room and scrape around for any possible clues. I’m not going to give any clues away but it’s fair to say the difficulty rating was pretty accurate!
Fortunately, the watchful eye of the game masters who run Escape Rooms is always on you, providing you with helpful clues when you appear to be completely stuck. Each room has cameras for monitoring and any clues come through a computer screen. It’s estimated that for the ‘Finding Sherlock’ room, gamers usually have around 20 clues to nudge them in the right direction. I would probably guess we had under 15 clues to help us, and we got out with five minutes to spare, leaving us all feeling extremely accomplished and slightly relieved that we actually managed to finish the task.
Once we were out, we were then given the option of winning back our money by performing a Crystal-maze-esque task where we were locked in a glass room and had to catch as much of the gold paper that was lying around as possible. Sounds easy? Well it really wasn’t. The wind turbines underneath the floor made this task significantly more difficult as the paper started floating around at super-fast speeds, but it was an entertaining experience watching the rest of your team scramble around to catch as much paper as possible! Unlike the Sherlock room, unfortunately this was not a task we could master and we didn’t end up winning our money back, but it was all good fun.
It’s very hard to describe to someone how awesome Escape Rooms actually is because you find yourself saying something along the lines of: “So it was great! You had to figure out a bunch of clues to get out of a room”. Doesn’t sound entertaining does it? Well, it’s definitely worth a visit whether that’s with your work team, friends, with family or with your partner. There are two other rooms for the Station Road crew left to visit called the Tomb and the Heist, both at varying difficulty levels, so we know what we’ll be doing on our next team day out.
If you’d like to give this a go and test whether you can get out faster than we did, you can book a game yourself at https://www.escaperoomscardiff.co.uk/