THIS GAME IS NOW CLOSED
Tick Tock Unlock – Project Pandora.
Location: Manchester
Game Date 04/07/2017.
Team: Amy & Ian
Theme:
“You have come far, you and your team of survivors. Now here you are, where it all started, where it could have ended. Where it will end – if only you are brave enough to put the pieces together of Doctor Mara Thanatos’ final work. You and your team must come face to face with the undead. With humanity on the verge of extinction, will you rise to the challenge?”
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but theming was minimal,bland and drab. Unfortunately, there were no redeeming features in this room, granted this keeps red herrings to a minimum, but this should never be done at the detriment of the theme of the room. There was nothing to suggest we were in a lab that was in lock down. There was no immersion, it was the most basic of rooms with (broken) sets of drawers (that were EXACTLY the same style as in The Hatch room) I was seriously underwhelmed with this room.
The space was good however, and it could have been used to much greater effect.
Game Play:
A fairly liner game that started with the team being split (again exactly like The Hatch) it felt like history repeating. The game consisted of mainly observation puzzles, with the opening puzzles being a lot better than the puzzles in the main bulk of the room.
There was an attempt to deliver more story within the game play, incorporating a puzzle into it, but this fell flat as there was too much fluff around the puzzle that wasted so much time if you had to repeat it.
The flow was OK, considering there weren’t that many puzzles in the room… It felt a bit light on puzzles after the split.
1 puzzle in particular had a logic leap, and stalled us as part of the puzzle had fallen off before we entered the room… This was rather annoying as (after a hint) we knew exactly what we were to do but didn’t have the pieces to do it.
1 puzzle was quite ambiguous, if you’re going to have players count something it needs to be crystal clear as to how many there are, when you’re coming up with ideas of “is it this if you hold it this way” and “well it could be THAT if you hang it up” – This leads to frustration and confusion. Something that should never happen in an escape room.
The game played well in the split, encouraging team work and communication, however, there is a lot of colour used in the split, so you may struggle if you have any colour-blind players (Ian isn’t colour-blind and struggled to see one of the colours we needed – this could have be remedied by a hint, but none came) after the split, it seemed that the game lost momentum and whilst it never stalled, we were left going over and over on wrong solutions and going off in the wrong direction. There weren’t many Ah-Ha moments and I felt like a lot of the puzzles could have been solved by trial & error.
Enthusiasts… honestly. I can’t really recommend this room unless you just want to get your numbers up. Take 4, but be prepared that there may be moments where you’re not doing anything. Newbies, take a team of 6. Be prepared for logic leaps.
Clue System:
Clues were delivered via a screen
Game Host:
Laura again was our game host and was very friendly, however… I felt like her clues this time (we only used 1 in the hatch) came a little bit too late. The clues were useful and we were very appreciative of them, but I feel sometimes we were left going off on the wrong track and trying other (wrong) things for too long before a clue was given.
Did we escape?
Yes, but it was a close one, we had 11 seconds left!!! We had about 3-4 clues
Website: https://www.ticktockunlock.com/location/manchester/
Price:
3 Players £48
4 Players £60
5 Players £70
6 Players £84
Brit of an Escape Habit 