Exit The Room: Madness

Exit The Room: Madness.
Location: Manchester
Game Date: 13/03/2018.
Team: Amy & Ian

Theme:
“The world famous professor recently showed the signs of losing his mind. He started secretly a new series of psychiatric tests as part of his mysterious project. The world is becoming more and more suspicious as not a single volunteer to his tests has returned the last few months. Your mission is to enter into his spooky laboratories and to find out what is he working on. Entering the labs you are in a possible death-trap and only have a mere 60 minutes to explore the secret and to prevent him from his crazy plan, which is most likely highly dangerous to mankind.”

A cleanly decorated room that felt quite disjointed from the story and theme given on the website. There was some theming, and a decent soundtrack. A few pictures adorned the walls that served as red herrings & puzzles.
The room was more than large enough for the maximum number of players (6) and had good lighting.

Game Play:
A linear game that was heavily maths based. Puzzles compromised of maths, symbol matching and observation…. and a jigsaw.
Some puzzles felt constricted in their logic and required logic leaps to come to the conclusion. Other puzzles, had they been executed in a better, clearer and more precise manner could have been really lovely, complex and solvable.
One puzzle I did enjoy, the pieces matched up clearly, logically and it was a fun puzzle to solve.
A few red herrings and misleading logic in this room meant that frustration could easily escalate and we spent a lot of time overcomplicating and creating our own puzzles (this impacted our game as there were no microphones in the room, so the game host could hear us going “off script”)
The heavy linearity in this room meant that the flow was sticky, and when there was no clue as what to do next, there was nowhere else to go to and recalibrate the mind to try to get over the sticky-ness.
One concern is with the maths in the room,  there was no calculator provided!
Yes we realise that we could use our phone, but we’re taught and asked by so many escape rooms to not use phones within the game it felt wrong to be using a phone as a calculator. Just provide players with one, it’s a little thing that will make the experience all the better.

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via walkie talkie, generally only when asked for.

Game Host:
Beth was our game host, she was polite and delivered good clues when we needed them

Did we escape?
No. Despite spending at least 20 minutes on the the final puzzle.

Website: http://www.exittheroom.co.uk
Price:
2 Players £39
3 Players £54
4 Players £68
5 Players £79
6 Players £89