Expecto Patronum!

Expecto Patronum! - as you may guess from the title - is a Harry Potter-themed escape room. When disturbing news arrives that something terrible is happening on the school grounds, you must grab your wand and muster your courage to face it. Along the way, you’ll be met with challenges that you’ll need to overcome before you can save the day. The experience began with some scene-setting by the GM, who grilled us on our knowledge of spells to ensure we were well-equipped for the trials ahead. We were then led into the first of three rooms, which included a very fun personalised element! We loved the theming overall and appreciated that a lot of the puzzles felt rooted in the Harry Potter world. Our only criticism, as with a lot of other rooms, is that sometimes the darkness made it hard to read certain items. Gameplay was predominantly linear and offered a wide variety of puzzles for us to tackle. There were some very tactile elements (jigsaw-type puzzles), observation-based tasks and some fun magical interactions. The majority of the room was mechanical, with only one physical lock to open. While I would say that this room was on the easier side, we did end up getting locked in, which was largely due to a technical issue with one of the puzzles. I can’t go into the specifics without ruining it, but it involved an arrangement of portraits not functioning as they should. Once this was resolved, we were able to complete the puzzle quickly. Generally a couple of the tasks we had to do involved mechanisms that were particularly slow and tedious to deal with. If these could be improved it would be a much better room. The game ends in a dramatic confrontation, which felt very fitting for this particular room. It was magical! Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed the room, despite some technical niggles, and booked to do another Escape Time room afterwards. A couple of things to be aware of: while the room is playable in English, the audio elements are in Polish. We hadn’t realised this when we booked, but luckily one of us speaks fluent Polish, so it wasn’t too much of an issue. In terms of accessibility, this room is on the first floor and the only access was via a set of stairs.

It was 2 of us, we needed a lot of hits as did not understand those puzzles or it just was not clear to us, even though we have had done few more difficult escape rooms. Hint system was not the greatest and some of the puzzles were not satisfying or just annoying. It was nice of them to let us finish and escape room way over our time. Not sure if would recommend, maybe to some Harry Potter fans and definitely for more than 2 people.