Pier Pressure: Raver Quest review

As with Modrophenia and Pavilion Perplex, Pier Pressure once again knocked it out the park with theming. After we signed in, we were greeted by our host who was dressed in outlandish eighties gear and who had the energy of a Duracell bunny. She walked us down to our room and stayed in her loud DJ persona throughout the brief. It really did add to the raver theme. Once inside, we found ourselves in a small club style room with a DJ booth, bar, flashing lights, lasers and most importantly an Ibiza classic 90s soundtrack blaring out from the speakers.

The gameplay linked to the theme throughout, where you used all the areas in the club to solve puzzles, from the bar to the DJ booth and yes even the toilet! I particularly liked how you even have to pull off some of your best dance moves to advance through the challenge! I’m sure our host got a great kick out of laughing at these.

We’re first introduced to our games master who’s in character as DJ Essex. She plays this role very well as she guides us into the club and explains the premise in an exaggerated Essex accent and dressed in neon rave clothing. The low lit room was relatively small, squeezing in a DJ booth with decks, disco lights, a cocktail bar and a toilet cubicle. It’s not the highest quality build I’ve seen, but it’s perfectly fine. Classic 90s dance music plays in the background throughout, getting us in the party mood. The puzzles were all themed very well to the setting, involving every aspect of organising and enjoying a night of clubbing.

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As with Pier Pressure’s other rooms, the games are not linear. If you get stuck on one puzzle, there is plenty more to work on. Whilst most are sensor driven, I feel a few were solved by the host pressing a button i.e. the dance task. For the first half, the games were standard logic puzzles where you searched for items to solve clues. The latter half required some skill and team communication. As I’m sure you can imagine, a room with speakers blaring out tunes made it very difficult to communicate with each other. So much so that at one point we found ourselves getting so frustrated as we couldn’t hear each other to complete the task at hand.

I think this game was the second in all our experiences to make us just want to quit. Thankfully our host took pity on us and said we could skip this game. So whilst our card may say we escaped, I felt we failed. Clues were delivered via a dot matrix display. At times, I found we were being sent hints without asking for them, which did annoy me. Whilst the challenge we got stuck on really annoyed me, I still enjoyed the other puzzles.

There were more puzzles than expected, given the limited space available. Just as I thought we were nearing the end, a load more suddenly appeared and overwhelmed us a little! There’s a lot of physical and team tasks on offer, involving things like sequencing, memory, logic and observation. They range from the very low tech to the relatively high tech. There’s a couple of key and number locks, but progression methods vary throughout the game.

A couple of small setbacks were caused by a flimsy prop and by it looking like a piece of retro tech needed a battery. But our biggest roadblock was an audio instructional team game that we found infuriatingly difficult. Although we knew what to do, we gave up on it as we couldn’t master it. It wasn’t helped by the fact there was audio leakage meaning we heard multiple voices simultaneously. Seeing our frustration, our host offered us the chance to skip it, which we gladly accepted!

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To play a room where there’s music blaring out and you get to dance is a really fun idea. However for me, when you are given a challenge that is pivotal to the game that requires communication, it doesn’t work. Despite the fun we had in the room for the most part, that communication challenge just left me so angry and bitter which in turn downgraded my enjoyment.

I’d been looking forward to playing this room for a long time as I love classic dance tunes and this theme seemed perfect for me. Having them playing in the background really added to my enjoyment of the game. Although one part of me wanted it louder, it was the right volume to not interfere too much with the puzzles. Overall it’s a very fun experience, from the animated and friendly receptionist, to the in-character host, lively music, and plethora of teamwork-orientated tactile tasks. There were a couple of frustrating parts though which put a slight dampener on it. Plus I may have hyped it up a bit too much in my head which meant it was always going to struggle to live up to expectations!

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The price for this room is a standard fee for Brighton. Pier Pressure rooms are always well themed, the host plays their character well, and usually the puzzles are fair and solvable. For me though with that stupid challenge at the end, which our host let us technically bypass, it ruined the experience and the game. I feel to guarantee you have a great time I would play one of their other rooms instead. If you’re an experienced escape room player, you may fly through all these challenges and have a different outlook on the game. I feel a newbie will struggle on the latter half of the challenges.

After our game, we were given a Pier Pressure logoed badge each along with a card stamped with our achievements. We got sick dance skillz, on the ball and perseverance penguin, having escaped in 57 minutes. Pier Pressure are one of my favourite escape room companies. They put passion and originality into their rooms, and perfectly combine professionalism and fun. Teamwork is key to make it to the end of the night in Raver Quest. If you hanker after the 90s clubbing scene, this is a 60 minute throwback to the good old days where you can bust some shapes whilst also giving your brain a workout. It cost us £28 each to play this as a group of three.

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