cQ Origenes

Always a fun and high quality experience from clueQuest!

Very fun, strong narrative and excellent attention to detail in the props. Puzzles flowed well and the experience felt immersive.

If you’ve ever watched Honey, I Shrunk The Kids or Ant-Man, you’ll have some idea why we were so excited to play cQ ORIGENES. It features a really fun mechanic, where the team must shrink down to the size of a mouse to access Mr. Q’s old base. Why do they need to do this? Well, to avert a crisis, of course – this time, a cyber attack orchestrated by none other than Professor BlackSheep. Before starting the mission, we were each assigned a role, such as Captain or Navigator. These were important early on, so thankfully we all did a good job of remembering them. This room combines linear and non-linear gameplay across two distinctly different rooms. In the first, your job is to fire up the Shrink’o’mat, which is trickier than it looks! Once you’ve shrunk down, you’ll explore the old base, which is full of secrets, hidden objects and mind-bending challenges. As with the other rooms at clueQuest, there is a large element of searching. I actually relished in the role of key searcher, which meant I wasn’t left standing around while others were tackling a puzzle. It was thrilling to step into a space where everything was super-sized. A gigantic working padlock was particularly impressive, along with a huge box of matches and a giant cassette player. Interestingly, the giant padlock is the only traditional lock in the room. Instead, you’ll be moving sliders, turning gears and slotting objects into place. Standout moments were firing up the Shrink’o’mat for the first time, with all of the cool sounds and lights, and when the ah-ha moment hit with the giant cassette player. Our team of four felt like the perfect size, and we each had moments to shine. There was one very fiddly puzzle right at the end of the game that cost us a large chunk of time. It relied heavily on teamwork, and with the added time pressure, it certainly kept us on our toes. Our hearts raced as we frantically fired up the Shrink’o’mat to return to our normal size, finishing with minutes to spare. cQ ORIGENES was a big hit with our team, in no small part because of the supersized nature. We can only imagine what they could do with this concept in an even bigger space. For a full review of the venue and other rooms on offer, head to EscapePuzzler.com

While the mechanics of this room were generally enjoyable and it started out well, this is the room that we've had to receive the most hints in regarding the next step. The puzzles themselves weren't too difficult, but figuring out what was next frequently stumped the two of us. When a puzzle was completed, the new items or information that we received were unclear. This is difficult through obfuscation rather than mentally challenging, and that led to a frustrating experience that I wouldn't recommend.

Sadie was a super GM who really made us feel welcomed back and provided excellent support in terms of nudges and the odd kick in the pants when needed. There’s a lot to do in this room and we found it tricky to keep up with what to do, when to do it and what should happen next but perhaps that’s just us. It was still great fun and the theming is absolutely stunning. I have loved all the games here but this is definitely the most challenging. Maybe another pair of hands would have helped.

The promise of the premise is greater than the reality of the experience. Being shrunk down to the size of a mouse and interacting with a once small world turned huge is so fun that before even setting foot in the space your imagination gets a little carried away. It's not that the room is poorly designed, it's just that when you imagine being micro machine sized you'd hope to get to do more than match different designs on the spines of now big books. The first half the escape is very fun and innovative, but the second half under-delivers.

Great, fun and different room

We did this room as a two person team of enthusiasts. The puzzles were varied and interesting, using a combination of both analog and fun tech elements. It probably wouldn’t parallel well, so I would recommend a small team for folks who have done a lot of escape rooms. It felt well balanced for the two of us. The set and theming was really where this room shines and we really enjoyed the atmosphere. Sadie was a great GM. If we had more time, we would definitely love to do more rooms at Clue Quest.

This is a solid escape room. I think the theme is pretty cool with small items portrayed as life size props. The problem is that I didn't love the puzzles. There are a few time waster gameplay moments where you just need to repeat clumsy mechanisms multiple times. We also just didn't find a bunch of stuff as intuitive, and the GM was kind of walking us through most of the room. It wasn't super satisfying because of that.

Novel concept: shrink down and explore a room at tiny size! A neat idea and executed pretty well. A few puzzles that I didn’t love, but overall quite good. I have no clue why it’s called “cow Origenes” instead of something normal like “shrink ray” 4/5