Escape Game Over – Maniac

Escape Game Over – Maniac
Location: Liverpool
Game Date: 28/05/2021
Team: Amy, Ian, Ste & Niamh
Duration: 60 Minutes

Theme:
“You wake up in the dark, something feels terribly wrong. Your fears are realized when you hear “I want to play a game”. With horror you realise you’re in Jigsaw’s death chamber. Now your only chance for survival is to follow his twisted games, do you have what it takes to defeat jigsaw and earn your freedom, or will it be….game over?”

Maniac started out well in its theming, with a dark dingy room that fitted the theme quite nicely, as we progressed through the game the theming continued, but not to quite as high as a standard as the first space.
There was a few props about to encourage immersion, and the room had the feel of being in a run down laboratory/office more than a serial killer’s lair.
On the whole, the upkeep was ok. We experienced a critical error with a puzzle breaking and the previous team had put it back wrong, which meant we lost a lot of time until the game host came in and sorted it for us. A quick check of all the puzzles in the room in the reset would have prevented this from happening.
The space was more than large enough for the four of us, lighting was dim due to theme but never really hampered game play.
This game does start within handcuffs, but getting out of them is fairly quick and painless.

Game Play:
A linear game with a decent selection of puzzles, logic, searching, and some small physical. The transition between 2 of the spaces was a lot of fun.
Quite often in this game we had bits of puzzles way before we needed them which led to going down the wrong path many times.
The logic behind the puzzles was fair, in most cases and once we had stumbled out way through the first half of the game, the puzzle became a lot clearer and more enjoyable.
Puzzles were sort of in theme, loosely.. and a clear attempt had been made to tie the puzzles into the general theme of “serial killer”
Signposting was hit an miss, some puzzles worked really good with the signposting present, and some just needed a little tweak and clarification.
A couple of puzzles were a bit dodgy, the aforementioned reset wasted us a lot of time, as we had actually solved the puzzle correctly, yet we would NEVER have gotten the correct answer due to the pieces being incorrectly placed. This just shows that final double check of the room should always be undertaken! (Kudos to our game host though as he handled it very well)
Flow was slow to begin with, but picked up dramatically in the final stages of the game and became a lot more playable.

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via a voice over in the room.

Game Host:
Michael was our game host, and as luck would have it, he actually hosted us at Escape Preston back in the day. He was pleasant and enthusiastic and delivered us great hints, nudges and clues when we needed them. An all round great host.

Covid19 Safety:
Masks were worn at all times during our visit and hand sanitizer was available.

Did we escape?
Yes, in 55 minutes!

Website: https://liverpool.escapegameover.co.uk/index.php
Price:
2 Players £40
3 Players £51
4 Players £64
5 Players £75
6 Players £84