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Reviews

Prison Break

Prison Break

Jersey War Tunnels

  • Escape room
  • IRL
This room has been the source of much frustration, over a period of years! Its availability is tied to the seasonal opening of the War Tunnels, a genuine network of tunnels dug to serve as a German hospital during the occupation of Jersey during World War 2, which is now a museum. After a much-delayed opening ("coming in 2021" still said the website in 2022), Prison Break finally opened not long before the War Tunnels closed for the winter in around October 2022. Upon re-opening in spring 2023, Prison Break had to close again fairly soon after for repairs, and didn't re-open again in 2023. When the War Tunnels re-opened again in spring 2024 I was keen to give it a go, albeit a little concerned as to why it had such a troubled start. It's absolutely fantastic that the War Tunnels have embraced escape rooms, drawing on the WW2 theme, but one gets a sense that a disconnect between the War Tunnels and those who have designed/installed them may cause delays in dealing with issues.In terms of positives, an escape room in a venue like this is a strong place to start from, and walking through the tunnels on the way to the game helps set the feel. There is so much potential here. When we arrived at the game itself, it gave a good impression on entering, with a pretty decent looking interior for the theme (with a couple of anachronistic touches, but that didn't bother us too much). I imagine historical venues such as the War Tunnels probably have significant limitations on making adjustments to the physical fabric of the rooms. In order to access our starting cell we were led through the later part of the game. This probably isn’t ideal in terms of immersion, but it’s understandable given the likely limitations on configuration/access. The staff were friendly, and the briefing took place in the starting cell. As the game progressed, the atmospheric sound, lighting and talking from prison guards and allies etc did a really good job of re-creating the wartime feel. A 50-minute room can sometimes be a bit of a red flag for me. Is the business trying to squeeze more customers in for the same price (see also here: the completely unrealistic 10 person maximum stated on the website - with a fixed £22 per person charge that doesn’t change with group size - minimum 4)? Is there not enough content for a 60 minute-game? Unfortunately there wasn't an awful lot to solve in this room, but despite that we still failed, having completed about 95% of it. There were some fun moments, but it felt like most of the time went into scratching our heads over two problematic puzzles. The first of these seemed to suffer from the dreaded layered ambiguity, involving having to line some things up which did not provide clear results, and then having to input each of these possible answers into a mechanism that was capable of giving more than one result for the same input. For added measure: which of the 4-digit padlocks to put each of these attempts into? In fact we received a nudge on this which put us back on track. But what really took the fun out of this room for us was the final puzzle, which was essentially all we had left to solve with around 15 minutes left. No problem, right? The concept for this puzzle wasn't bad at all, but having worked out the correct sequence we attempted to input it over and over, slowly watching the time fade away. The problem, we eventually found out, was that we were simply starting the sequence from the wrong starting point, out by one space. We thought the written information provided seemed pretty clear, but it seems we got that wrong… In most escape rooms this would be the point where you'd receive a small nudge to say you just need to adjust your start position slightly - and save you the endless trying and failing, never really sure whether the correct answer would trigger any kind of obvious signal that you have solved it. We didn't get that help until too late, and, frustratingly, it was compounded by a few things. We had been told in the briefing that we were only allowed three hints (a practice which thankfully seems to have been mostly left behind by modern escape rooms), which we could ask for using a telephone. We weren't really sure how many of the three we'd had at this point. Some sort of positive intervention by the GM would have been handy here, given how long we spent trying the same correct pattern but starting from the wrong place. Before starting I normally ask that if it looks like we're stuck, falling behind time and look like we need a nudge, to just let us know. But here, unusually, there was no "any questions?" moment in in the briefing. I suppose maybe that's just how this particular game works, so fair enough. When we eventually got a hint on this it was all a bit too late, plus (without me trying to spell out details here) the information given in the hint seemed to reverse what we were clearly told in the written instructions about what had to be "up" and what had to be "down" (although it’s possible we misheard this). This confused us further. So the clock ticked down to zero and the GM came into the room to commiserate us on a good effort. We went through the final puzzle again with him, using the correct starting point, and then looked in the place where we had been expecting to find the final item we needed to escape (which was in a separate locked space inside a large chest) and indeed it was open. How long had it been open? Who knows. We had previously closed the chest as it heavily fell closed at one point, and seemed like a bit of a hazard (as did the way another item in the room opened at an earlier point). We played as three adults and three youngsters. Overall this felt like a room with potential that perhaps hasn't benefited from proper play testing and adjusting. Writing this kind of feels like a long-winded excuse for failing the room. For me the possibility of failing is an really important part of escape rooms. But this felt particularly disappointing to have spent such a big part of the time endlessly trying the same thing for want of a small but clear nudge. Had that come, we might have left with quite a different feeling. During the brief conversation after it seemed the issue with the final puzzle had previously been noted already, but yet to be tweaked. But I suppose that if those issues were cleared up, teams might well be getting out in 15 minutes or so. I’ve seen other rooms with a similarly small footprint manage to cram in far more game content. I would love to see the War Tunnels work with a designer with a proven track record for quality games who could really do justice to this amazing space with their next room, and put as much care into the content and flow of the game as appears to have gone into electronic gizmos (a criticism of Jersey’s previous most recent room, Space Quest, at a now closed venue). It pains a me a little to write something as negative as this, as I want to love the games in Jersey and would hate to see War Tunnels stop supporting this part of the business. I would urge those involved to explore some top venues outside of Jersey, if they haven’t already, to see how much more is possible in terms of creating a truly great experience. [edit: they managed to lose/delete the team photo they took, which is a bit disappointing for a £132 game]
Space Quest

Space Quest - CLOSED

Quest Escape Rooms

  • Escape room
  • IRL
Having played all of Quest’s previous efforts I wasn’t hugely optimistic about the opening of a new room, but a combination of the lack of other options in Jersey, and the possibility that they might have learnt from previous attempts drew me to give their new Space Quest room a try. Sadly, it is another game that falls well short of standards, and many of the shortcomings of earlier games are repeated here. One of the reasons Quest’s previous games have disappointed me is the sense that they have done little more than stick a puzzle in each corner of the room. Whilst it is often a positive for a room to allow team members to solve different puzzles in parallel, i.e. for there to be no linear order in which tasks must be completed, what lets Quest down is that there is no connection between those different puzzles. Space Quest hasn’t really moved past this approach – again it’s a case of solve x number of tasks to win. Much of the fun of an escape room can be in one puzzle opening up a new puzzle or a new area to explore, but here it feels like ticking a series of boxes. There is vey little sense of physical exploration, with nearly all items and areas being available from the start. Likewise, beyond the very short initial briefing and the general spaceship décor there was little by way of development of any kind of story. Like previous Quest rooms, there was no facility for two-way audio communication between the players and the gamesmaster. A spaceship theme could easily have integrated some form of screen to deliver text-based hints, and I would have had no complaints with hints being given over speakers. But sadly, again, the gamemaster has no means of hearing what the players are saying, so the only interaction with the gamesmaster is by way of him walking into the room to see how you are getting on. It is fairly well established that having the gamesmaster enter the room is a killer of any sense of immersion, any feeling that you may actually be in a space ship (or whatever the theme of the room happens to be), with the possible exception of where the hints/interaction are delivered whilst in full character/costume. Another problem we have seen before at Quest is puzzles which rely on the player either not moving, or taking careful note of the particular position in which an item or items are first found in the room. Movement of the items by the players can then make the puzzle much more difficult to solve. Space Quest repeats this mistake, and again this is long established bad puzzle design. Players should and will pick up everything they can, and shouldn’t be punished for exploring. Space Quest opts for a playbook/operations manual approach, whereby guidance or hints on each of the puzzles is contained in a single book within the room. This often isn’t conducive to fun escaping, although it works OK here in the context of getting the ship’s various systems back online. The focus is very much on electronic puzzles, and skill games. It is perhaps a matter of taste, but for me the effort put into the electronics would have been much better spent on improving the quality of the puzzles and the general flow of the room. The odd skill game can be fun, but here they felt like time drains to make up for the lack of more conventional puzzles. There are of course techniques to skill games, but if you’re not very good at them they can become pretty tedious, and it wasn’t clear if there was any way for the gamesmaster to override them here if needed. In another instance, even once the means to solve the puzzle had clicked with us, it felt like there was too much process to go through to finish off the puzzle. As usual, the fun is in the ‘ah ha’ moment of realising what has to be done to solve a puzzle, not in laboriously going through the motions once it is clear what needs to be done. We escaped, and it wasn’t all bad, of course – the interior design gives a reasonable sense of being in a spaceship, and the electronics seemed to work well (in contrast to my experience in Quest’s Mission: Impossible room). The gamesmaster was friendly. The £20 per head we paid didn’t feel too excessive for our team of three, but I’d have been much happier if it had been a 60 minute (rather than 50 minute) game – an extra 10 minutes could well have been used to incorporate a decent final puzzle or series of puzzles to draw things towards an ending – or perhaps even a new area to explore. Aside from the generally poor nature of Quest’s rooms, one gets the sense that quality has given way to ensuring plenty of people are crammed into relatively short games. Space Quest can be booked for up to 10 people (with no reduction in cost per head), but it is beyond me how that many people could be properly occupied in a room with this little to offer. Perhaps this approach works for Quest, at least in the short term, but my fear is that over the course of the last few years, the opportunity has been missed to demonstrate to the local population how much fun escape rooms can be when well-designed. Rather than wanting more, new rooms, people whose first experience of an escape room is Quest may simply be left wandering what all the fuss is about. I would desperately like Quest to make a room that was on a par with decent rooms in the UK and elsewhere, but this one is still some way behind what those UK rooms were doing several years ago.
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