Room Lockdown: Alien Abduction review

Published by Escape Goats on

You are awoken by a bright shining light. You find yourself tied up in a human pod, having been involved in an alien experiment! You and your team have to escape from your pod, make your way into the bridge and try to navigate the UFO back to Earth before the aliens are made aware.
60 minutes
2-6 players
Medium difficulty (56% success rate)
£15 per person
Hornchurch, London
roomlockdown.com
Played by Daiman, Jenny, Paul, Bharath
June 2018
Escaped with 21 minutes remaining

Theming

7/10This is a double-edged sword but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt here! The actual decoration of each room had a very homemade feel to it but they had gone to the effort of making each seperate area distinct from the last and they were identifiably the locations that were intended. A bit more of a budget here and it would’ve looked even cooler!

 Daiman

5/10Whilst the set design was leaning more to the basic side, I liked how this company added in little decorations to keep to theme that reminds you of alien films you’ve watched in the past. I think there was a lot more that could be done in this room but I feel the limited space and potential costs to make the room more technological would be too great.

Jenny

5/10You can tell the set design has been done on the cheap. It’s a bit of a Blue Peter “here’s one I made at home” kinda job. But if you look beyond the quality, it does the job. The room is split up into sections, taking you through the themes storyline of escaping from the pod, going into the ships bridge and navigating the ship back to Earth.

Paul

6/10There was a DIY feel to this room, which ruined the realism of the room.

 Bharath

Puzzles

2/10Oh man, these were mostly ridiculously easy. So much so that I doubt anyone would have much trouble with 90% of the tasks in this game. Weirder still was the fact that the difficulty curve seemed to work in reverse, the hardest puzzles by far resided in the opening room. You expect the difficulty to increase as the game progresses, not the opposite.

 Daiman

4/10Even though I enjoyed this game, I feel the puzzles were too easy and basic to challenge experienced gamers. The game is completely linear with quite a lot of the same puzzles being repeated over and over again. I also found it disappointing that there were no real skill games or space age games. However the games kept to the theme which increased my score.

Jenny

4/10There’s little new here which meant we sped through most of the puzzles as we knew how they worked. Plus some were very simple like the one with the leads. They said afterwards that we were 5 minutes off the fastest ever time. There was one new bit of tech that we encountered however which limited our movement at the beginning which was a cool idea.

Paul

5/10This room is very linear with all logic based puzzles, no skill involved. There was a lot of matching symbols to numbers.

 Bharath

The outside of the Room Lockdown building

Enjoyment

8/10You know what, despite the puzzles being pretty abysmal as far as their complexity went, they made sense and I really appreciated the progression through very different sets. I think a lot of thought had gone into the game’s construction apart from the actual game elements.

 Daiman

5/10The host to the room was really friendly and helped add to the fun of this game. The game itself was the first alien game I’ve played, the scenery and setting were well designed and it was fun to crawl through tunnels and play with the science tools.

Jenny

6/10Due to the simple puzzles, it didn’t test me too much. And as it wasn’t difficult, we escaped with plenty of time to spare which cut short our game and therefore our enjoyment. It was still pretty fun to play, but it’s not a game that I’ll be raving about.

Paul

7/10Newbies may find this room fun, especially at the start which is a bit different from other rooms I have played. For experienced players, they’ll find this room quite easy and will get through it quite quickly as no real skill is required.

 Bharath

Value

5/10I know the game’s cheap but if we’re able to tear through it with little challenge, the perceived value drops immensely. That said, I did enjoy it but maybe we were just the wrong audience for this – you’d have a far more rounded experience if you’ve played very few games or none at all!

 Daiman

6/10Whilst this game is really cheap for escape rooms, I feel this game would be more suited to a newbie or younger people rather than experienced gamers.

Jenny

7/10Although it’s a budget room, it’s also a budget price as there aren’t many, if indeed any, escape room experiences for just £15 in London. As long as you don’t mind a simple experience, you should still enjoy it. Newbies who know no better will probably really enjoy this.

Paul

6/10For £15 per person it’s definitely on the lower end of the scale for escape rooms, in terms of priority though in terms of rooms to do, I would put it lower down on the list.

 Bharath

The good

The opening room had a really unique feature that I absolutely wouldn’t want to spoil. Needless to say, this game was very well considered from an experiential point of view with lots of cool little interactions with the environment.

 Daiman

I feel the company did a great job with the set design with a limited space. I thought they tried to bring a hi-tech feel to the experience which I liked.

Jenny

It’s a basic room which is ideal for beginners who don’t really understand how escape rooms work. It’s also good for the budget conscious, being just £15 per person.

Paul

The start of this room was fun, which definitely involved a team effort.

 Bharath

The bad

The puzzles. There was one involving wires that was ridiculously basic to the point that I was amazed that the solution we attempted worked. Again though, if this is intended to be a beginner’s game then this is less of a foul though I still reckon this and a few other moments are simple by even those standards.

 Daiman

For me the puzzles were the big let down in this game. There was no real skill required and I was not fond of how similar the puzzles were to each other. The other part of the game I found disappointing was having to watch a computer screen for 3 mins whilst we were travelling in space. Surely we could travel at light speed?

Jenny

Those who have done a few escape rooms before will likely find this too simple. There was something that we needed hidden behind a sign with a ‘do not touch’ sticker on. There was an object in the room which we expected to need to use but it was mainly just for show which was a disappointment as it would have been fun to play with.

Paul

There was a video in the middle which I felt was a bit boring and while watching I kind of wanted it to end so I could get on with the game.

 Bharath

Overall scores

  • Theming - 5.75/10
    5.8/10
  • Puzzles - 3.75/10
    3.8/10
  • Enjoyment - 6.5/10
    6.5/10
  • Value - 6/10
    6/10
5.5/10