Company:
Room Escape Southend

Location:
Park Inn Hotel, Church Road, Southend-on-Sea, SS1 2AL

Synopsis:
You are in a hotel on Southend seafront and have 30 minutes to solve the clues and work out who has been murdering the guests.

Date we visited:
20 January 2018

Price at time of visit:
£5 per person

Goats attended:
Daiman, Jenny, Paul, Bharath and 1 other

Did we escape?
No

THIS ROOM HAS SINCE CLOSED

Value for money

8/10You know, £5 for a game, even if it’s only 30 mins long, is good value. If you scaled it up, that would be £10 for the hour. Given that it was a pop-up experience, they slightly tweaked the gameplay and centered it around solving a murder rather than physically getting out of the room.

Daiman

9/10At £5, the room was good value for money for the 30 mins. It was good fun to experience a pop up as part of the Horror on Sea festival.

Jenny

6/10It’s half the length of a usual escape room, but at only £5 each it’s less than a third of the price you’d expect to pay. The downside is because it’s just a popup room, it’s quite basic.

Paul

7/10For £5, it’s definitely value for money. You won’t find many cheaper.

Bharath

Theming

5/10It was just a hotel room with a few objects littered around the place. The reason why we were there didn’t make much sense once we reached the finale which bugged me a little.

Daiman

5/10As it was a pop up, the theming was limited to what the hotel allowed in the room. I felt it was lacking the gore and blood. Something you’d expect at a murder investigation.

Jenny

6/10It’s held in a real hotel room which means they didn’t have to do much with the theming, seeing as they set the story around that room. But they didn’t make much effort to show that a murder had taken place in there.

Paul

4/10As we were actually in a proper hotel, it’s as real as you are going to get, but I didn’t feel they did much to make the room feel more interesting.

Bharath

Uniqueness

6/10It’s a cool idea – opening a pop-up room at another event and I did like the twist that this game wasn’t centered around escaping. Once you peel that away however, the core gameplay was pretty basic.

Daiman

5/10The room was not unique as it was basically a hotel room in a hotel. However we thought the idea was unique to use the horror festival to promote their escape rooms.

Jenny

6/10This was a cross between an escape room and a murder mystery, which is quite different. The fact it’s set in an actual hotel room is cool.

Paul

4/10Even though they class this as an escape room, it’s more a murder mystery. You can leave whenever you want, but it’s all about finding the right murderer.

Bharath

Puzzles

3/10I’ll be straight up on this one, I didn’t see many of them – the game played with a capacity of six, we were close to that and it felt like there were too many people. The space, plus the shortened time reducing the amount of things to do meant that large groups were a hindrance here. I did enjoy the on-theme puzzles where solving the crime was concerned though.

Daiman

3/10As it was a pop up room there was only so much they could do. The puzzles were fairly basic but we were a little stumped on the ending where we weren’t quite sure what we had to do.

Jenny

3/10As this is a pop up room in a venue they don’t own, it limits what they can do with it. As a result, it just involved hunting for evidence, solving a couple of basic puzzles, then reading the evidence to work out who the killer is. As I’m not a fan of reading (I’d rather be solving puzzles), I didn’t enjoy that part of it.

Paul

3/10Be ready to have a good root around the room. The puzzles themselves were not that challenging and they didn’t really relate to the actual theme of the room. There were a few reports to read through during the course of the game which I’m not the biggest fan of.

Bharath

The good

It was a cool idea and the team should definitely be applauded for trying something different.

Daiman

The price was good, and I appreciated the idea of a pop up escape room.

Jenny

Being an escape room that is only being held for a few days means you get to experience something that few others will get to do.

Paul

As it was a proper hotel and the restrictions they would have had determining what they could do, they did ok.

Bharath

The bad

I would say that group size killed this for me – sorry teammates!

Daiman

I felt there should have been a bit more explanation on what we had to do. I’m also never a fan of the host being in the room.

Jenny

It was confusing as to what we were meant to do at the end once we had got all the evidence together which meant we were always going to lose. At 30 minutes, this doesn’t last very long. Because it was part murder mystery, it weakened the escape room side of it.

Paul

It wasn’t made clear what we had to do at the end which essentially cost us the game. I also lost track in the story.

Bharath

Overall scores