The Freakshow

Having played ‘The Abandoned Carnival’ twice previously over the last few years to see the changes, it felt like we had stepped onto the flip side of the coin in Padlock’d’s horror game ‘The Freakshow’. The ensuing experience was a fun escape room with a few unique bells and whistles that capture the theme of a freakshow circus experience. The live actor was tasteful in how they delivered jump scares, it would be cool to see a puzzle that requires the players to interact with the clown, given they were in and out of the rooms a few times. Only one prop malfunctioned and the GM was quick to spot and fix the issue. Thanks Annika!

This was my fifth escape room I ever did, but my friends first. She had an amazing experience and doesn’t stop talking about it. She always mentions how well the room was decorated and how much she loved having the live actor. So definitely a 10/10 experience for us both.

It’s been a while since I played a room that really leaned into the “live actor included” side of things (outside of a GM just banging on a wall or two), but The Freakshow used this element in such a exciting and horrifying way. The room itself isn’t anything spectacular in terms of puzzles but the anticipation of someone popping out at any given moment made everything infinitely more fun. From certain solves to the actual clue system itself, that godforsaken clown was used really well here. Not a difficult room by any stretch but we went for the scares and weren’t disappointed. 🤡

It was a nice room, but very easy. I think there were a lot of opportunities for live actors to jump out at you, but likely as we did it in the middle of the day on a Tuesday we didn't get much actor action. I was also looking out warily for jump-scares, so that might have contributed to a lack of scariness (despite that, I do wish it had been slightly more frightening). Our single encounter with the actor occurred when we got stuck on a specific puzzle, so they came into the room to try their best to show us what we needed to do next wordlessly - but as we were confused it took him a couple minutes of motioning for us to figure out what was going on, so it wasn't very scary in the end... I felt bad...

Really cool room! We had a live actor who did such a good job and gave us a couple jump scares!! Definitely scary especially cause the team is split up at points and the anticipation of the live actor jumping out at you!

Talk about scary! Every creaking door (even though it was us half time trying to find clues) had us on our toes. A few jump scares had us on edge as well. Only bad part of the room was the torches where not that bright which made a few puzzles hard to work out but overall really fun and scary room

Very cool and creepy room ;) quite scary, but also some of the jumpscares predictable and thus less scary if you want to ;) but overall a very nice room, I liked the decoration and puzzles :) just a bit short I would say, we did breeze through it and didn‘t even use half the time even though we didn‘t even try to be fast but went around rather cautious and slow🙈

Done this game a while ago but it still one of my favourites, definitely a great horror game

i really enjoyed this room with friends. i think it was really good to have live actors to make it very immersive

Another one we've brought multiple people to play, after playing with the 2 of us, and everyone has had a blast with it. The Live Actor has always made this room so much more fun