Caged: – Lost & Asylum

Caged: – Lost & Asylum
Location: Burnley
Game Date: 29/10/2019
Team: Amy & Ian

Unfortunately, I have decided to combine both of caged rooms into one review, as there was a lack of content in both rooms, with each being a very similar experience to the other.

Theme:
Lost and Asylum were both set in small single rooms, with a modicum of decoration to give a sense of the theme. Neither were immersive and both rooms were very very dark and with one torch given to the team, and another being available at the loss of a clue.
It’s good to see that Caged limit the rooms to 4 players max, as the rooms aren’t big enough to take any more than that.
An unusual take on the experience was that there are no cameras in Caged’s rooms, and no microphones. SO you really are on your own until you ask for a clue.

Game Play:
Both games were strictly linear, with both rooms having similar types of puzzles. Heavy searching, was a feature in both rooms.
Both the games suffered from an inexcusable lack of logic, where the puzzles would be perfectly logical to the creator, but with NO signposting whatsoever this makes the puzzle intrinsically hard and illogical. There was also a destructible puzzle in one of the rooms, where the order of something could easily have been messed up.
There was only one puzzle in both games we got with no clues, and we ended up having to use a clue on every single other puzzle.
In both rooms, the element of heavy searching led to us looking in places we would never have dreamt to in a normal escape room situation.
There was no flow, nor signposting to the rooms and had it not been for the clues we would have crashed and burned within the first 10 minutes of each game.
It’s hard to write reviews for games such as these, and we wholeheartedly appreciate the effort Caged have put into designing and creating these games, but a little more experience and research within the industry is sometimes needed to understand the whys and hows of puzzle design and game flow.

Clue System:
Clues were requested via a doorbell to a maximum of 3 clues.

Game Host:
Bradley was our game host and did a great job having only recently taken over the business.

Did we escape?
Yes, we escaped both in around 50 minutes

Website: http://escapecaged.com/
Price:
1 Player  £13
2 Players £26
3 Players £39
4 Players £52