No Exit – The Poltergeist Room

No Exit – The Poltergeist Room.
Location: Bolton
Game Date 18/04/2017.
Team: Amy & Ian

THIS GAME HAS NOW CLOSED

Theme:
“A Widow and daughter lived in this room before their sudden disappearance. Every once in a while, people have seen a silhouette of a woman. Can you connect clues the spirits are communicating? Are you able to perform a successful ghost exorcism in order to escape? You have 60 minutes before you’re possessed!”

Theming was suitable to the story, with the decor being quite simple to start and expanding to an overwhelmingly decorated, and quite disorienting room.
The room was clean and finished to a good standard, and didn’t have too many red-herrings but there was a lot of things to look at/through in the early stages of the room.
Immersion was OK, not a massively immersive room, but enough to give a good feeling of the room and space being haunted, with a great creepy soundtrack and a few small jump scares! Got a couple of screams from me at certain stages in the game.

Game Play:
A linear game, with almost exclusively observational puzzles, with one math puzzle thrown in. A touch more open in the later stages of the game but this all came back to the linearity again to finish.
All the puzzles made sense, and there were 2 puzzles which I really enjoyed, and were novel. They had lovely ah-ha moments, and were rewarding once completed!
Aside from the 2 enjoyable puzzles they seemed to lack the Ah-ha moment we seek, not that the puzzles weren’t logical, they were for the most part enjoyable… they just fell a bit flat compared to the 2 fun and rewarding puzzles that held the room up.
The flow was a bit sticky in places, this may have been our shortcoming as we are not the best at observation and this room requires that you have a very keen eye for detail!
The BIGGEST bug-bear to me was a damn jigsaw, which was a pure red herring. GET RID. Honestly, I do not mind a jigsaw that leads to a code or clue, but there is nothing more irritating than doing a jigsaw that leads no-where, it instantly sets me on edge and leads me to wonder how many more red-herrings there will be in the room (luckily that was the only one) – I would say take it out for smaller groups as it was just an utter waste of time!
I would recommend 3/4 for experienced players (We thought we’d have done better with an extra pair of eyes as it’s such an observational room) and I would recommend newbies play one of No Exit’s easier rooms first to ease their way into the harder rooms.

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via a screen.

Game Host:
Iffran was our game host, friendly and welcoming, he ran our game really well and helped us when we got stuck (but also did let us figure stuff out on our own)

Did we escape?
Yes, in 55 minutes so it was a close one!

Website: http://noexitrooms.co.uk/
Price:
2 Players £44
3 Players £60
4 Players £72
5 Players £80