Escape Room Arcade

The Escape Room Arcade was a really fun experience because majority of the rooms that we went into appealed to our skill set, especially physically interactive ones, like ‘Staying Alive’ and ‘The Floor is Lava’. However, some of the rooms are hit and miss, so it can depend on luck of the draw. However, we had a double session so we were able to get through more rooms - something to consider if it’s busy :)

The genre for this is best described more as a 'challenge arcade' than an escape room or at least from the minigames we played in it! I think if you go in expecting the immersion and puzzles of an escape room you'd be disappointed, but if you go in knowing these are more crystal maze-esque phyiscal / skill / mental challenges you'll have a good time. We had a fun hour of 5 minute challenges, some were a bit worn already for a quite new experience but I understand they get much more use than a usual escape room, we probably would have preferred a 90 minute slot, or maybe the ability to pause between playing some rooms rather than rushing between to get the most of our hour. Great concept, best for small groups. US examples are Boda Borg or Level 99 but the closest other equivalent in the UK is probably Prison Island in Maidstone.

Going in, you should know that this is not an escape room. It's a challenge arcade, analogous to Boda Borg, Level 99, or Prison Planet. The only other challenge arcade I've done was Boda Borg in Boston. Unlike Boda Borg, all the challenges at Enigma Quest were a single room. In each room, you've got 5 minutes to score as many points as you can in one particular game. I missed the escape-room-like sense of discovery you get of moving into a new room within a challenge-- but I nonetheless had more fun at Enigma Quest. I found Enigma Quest's scoring system much less frustrating than Boda Borg's binary pass/fail system. Games tended to be less like escape room puzzles, and more like challenges you'd see on The Crystal Maze or Survivor. (This was a plus for me-- I enjoyed the change. Your mileage may vary.) The themeing within the rooms was excellent and most of the games were very fun. I had two complaints: --The rooms are all next to each other and there's a certain amount of sound bleed. --In one of the rooms, a lightbulb within a game was burnt out. Depending on certain random elements within the game, that burnt out bulb could completely paralyze your progress, at which point you are basically stuck in an unplayable room until your five minutes run out. We mentioned this to the staff and they said, "Oh, yeah, we know about that, but we didn't think it was worth shutting down a whole challenge over one lightbulb." Despite those quibbles, we had a great time and I would happily return to try the games I didn't get to this time (and to try and improve my score on some of the games I particularly enjoyed.)