Company:
Omescape

Location:
All Saints Church, Carnegie Street, King’s Cross, London, N1 9QW

Synopsis:
A serial killer known as the Silent Man has kidnapped a child and keeps her at an unknown location. He was apprehended but a deadly brain disease has put him into a coma. Now your team of cyber-detectives has to enter Silent Man’s mind to discover a key memory, which will disclose the location of the kidnapped child. You have exactly 1 hour to complete your task before the connection is lost! Silent Man’s mind is dangerous so you will need to protect yourself by doing swimming, smashing, shooting and flying! Save the child before it’s too late!

Date we visited:
22 August 2017

Price at time of visit:
From £59 for a team of 2, to £119 for a team of 6

Goats attended:
Daiman, Jenny, Paul, Bharath

Did we escape?
Yes – with plenty of time to spare

Value for money

5/10Whilst you get access to what is considered the most advanced, commercially available VR system, you are essentially paying to play a video game. The experience is definitely fun but it feels less rounded than a physical room.

 Daiman

5/10We’ve been looking for more futuristic games, so we rushed at playing this for the small cost.

Jenny

5/10At £22.25 per person for a group of 4 in peak time, it’s a reasonable price.

Paul

6/10There are not too many VR experience escape rooms out there so it’s worth giving it a go. Don’t expect “The Matrix” though.

 Bharath

Theming

4/10The room itself is as bare as they get, populated with just chairs and the computer systems. The game itself doesn’t really capitalise on the VR, with a good chunk of the game taking place at a (virtual) table. The ending is where it really showed off it’s potential. Just before the game finished!

 Daiman

1/10It’s hard to rate this as this is a VR room, where the scenery shouldn’t matter as it’s all on the headset. However the room had no decoration and had mould patches on walls and the carpet.

Jenny

1/10The space you sit in for your experience is just a black room. Obviously once your VR headset is on, it doesn’t matter anymore but they could have done something with the room to set the scene.

Paul

5/10I’m not going to talk about the room itself because it’s VR, so it’s all about when you are connected. With VR, essentially the world is your oyster, anything is possible. With what I saw here, there is still a way to go.

 Bharath

Uniqueness

7/10Having an escape room take place in a virtual world is relatively fresh. The fact that it forces teamwork and players are able to freely communicate with each other via mics means that the game retains that escape room feel but enables players to break free of the limitations inherent in physical rooms. We were disappointed to be bound to our chairs the entire time (not literally!) as the Vive allows for roomscale VR gaming (i.e. you can actually walk around in the space).

 Daiman

6/10Again I was super excited trying this room as I thought it would be really hi-tech and fun. I found the game fairly basic on the face of it and felt like I’d have not missed out by playing the PlayStation VR at home. I scored the room higher mainly due to being able to play as a group which was a cool fun idea.

Jenny

8/10A virtual reality escape room is a very unique and unusual idea, but they have just licensed the VR software so there will be other companies out there offering the exact same experience, so it’s not truly unique.

Paul

5/10This was my first VR escape game experience, so at the time was a unique experience. However, I have used VR before and I do feel more could have been brought to the table.

 Bharath

Puzzles

2/10These were practically non-existent, ranging from finding a word at your desk to manipulating objects to fit certain spaces. Most of the game involved you either passing or receiving something to/from another player. There wasn’t anything remotely puzzling about what we needed to do throughout our time in the Mind Horror.

 Daiman

4/10The puzzles were really simple and the VR broke a couple of times which ruined our game. It was fun however seeing our other team mates in the visual aid of VR. I feel the puzzles would have been better if the VR was more hi tech. I feel this is definitely the way forward but I’m not sure the tech’s there just yet.

Jenny

4/10The puzzles are quite simplistic, but that is partly due to the limitations of VR and the fact that it’s still new and evolving technology. I particularly enjoyed the train track scene as it had puzzles which required teamwork and it came with a bit of a surprise!

Paul

3/10The puzzles were quite basic and were easy to solve. I feel it was made easy so that people could get used to the VR rather than challenge people. I do feel more of our time was spent dealing with VR issues rather than trying to solve clues.

 Bharath

The good

The VR is cool with full hand tracking without the need for gloves or anything like that. It also demonstrates the promise that VR games could have but they’ll have to come along a lot further before they can pose a credible threat to a bricks and mortar room.

 Daiman

I really enjoyed the team role play in this, plus it was cool to play my first VR room.

Jenny

The VR experience is cool, especially if you have not done it before. Most of the scenes in the game couldn’t be recreated in real life!

Paul

I think VR can be the next step in the evolution of escape rooms as there are endless possibilities available. However, it’s not like how VR is portrayed on TV, it’s still quite blocky and slow in parts.

 Bharath

The bad

You’re basically paying a lot of money to play a video game. Omescape should’ve done more to enhance this experience so it didn’t have the feeling of sitting around in a friend’s living room on the PS4. I’m thinking of 4D effects or something along those lines. It just doesn’t do enough to stand out at the moment.

 Daiman

The tech they provided broke for one of our team, this cost us a lot of time. I also didn’t appreciate the aroma of the room as a previous group had been sick. For me, when we left this room we found a whole family eating a KFC bucket. They were not part of the game, it was just social. I found this really unprofessional and they need to work on this.

Jenny

The room had a strong stench of vomit because a drunk guy the day before was sick during the game (virtual reality can affect motion sickness sufferers). I accidentally knocked something off my headset which stopped it from working and it took a while before they noticed and came down to rectify it. I far prefer physical escape rooms to virtual ones. As a one off experience though, it was cool.

Paul

You can get similar on a console, the only difference here is that it is more team orientated. By the end, I was happy to finish, I wasn’t craving more.

 Bharath

Overall scores