Review: Breakout Liverpool.

[Image credit: Breakout Liverpool]

Remember those online escape games that you used to sneakily play (along with The Impossible Quiz and all of Miniclip's procrastination-perfect offerings) instead of learning how to use Excel during I.T. lessons in high school? They've recently been popping up in the form of real-life escape rooms that you and your friends can pay to get locked in, in the hopes that you can break free in just an hour.

 

I was recently invited along to the Northwest's newest escape centre, Breakout Liverpool*, with my team consisting of my boyfriend, his brother and his brother's girlfriend, to try our luck at breaking out of their 'Classified' room. The second hardest of their three rooms and the prequel to their most difficult escape game, 'Sabotage', Classified saw us sitting our final exam to become a secret agent, in which we had to examine the various objects in the room for hidden clues, unlock a series of padlocks and find a sequence of cards in order escape from the room and pass the test.

 

Sixty minutes trapped in a room no bigger than your living room where every single object inside is relevant to your mission. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Whilst a GCSE in math isn't compulsory in becoming a top secret agent (a calculator is provided for any mathematic equations you may need to work out, who knew?), these escape rooms require a fair amount of logical thinking, common sense and a knowledge of how to actually open different kinds of padlocks after you have unlocked them (heh...). By the time we hit the thirty minute mark, the suspenseful music was getting to us, our patience with one another was wearing thin and nervous sweats were forming at the sound of the yelling coming from the escapees trying to break free from the room next to us. We had only managed to find three of the eight cards needed to work out the final combination and we had been stood staring at the same pictures on the wall for the past ten minutes- we were doomed, surely.

However, the Breakout team are on standby in the control room, watching your every move on the CCTV cameras and flashing up cryptic clues on the wall-mounted monitor whenever they felt you needed a little extra help (and probably laughing every time you walk past something obvious... suckers). These clues aren't easy, however- they are puzzles in themselves, there to jog your mind in to thinking outside the box and they often left us kicking ourselves for not noticing clues that were right in front of us.

With twenty minutes left to spare, the thought of continuing with our day jobs got too much for us and we picked up the pace, working out the last few combinations and discovering vital clues which led us to the remaining cards. With just over six minutes to spare before our dreams of becoming the next Jason Bourne would be crushed, we tapped the mathematical equation on the series of cards in to the calculator to reveal the four-digit padlock combination which broke away the chains on the final box containing our key to freedom. The name is Bond. Frances Bond.

If you are in to puzzle-solving, team-building or simply yelling at the contestants on Fort Boyard/ The Crystal Maze on your TV, Breakout Liverpool is for you. Allowing teams of between two and five players, the more people you bring along with you, the cheaper it is for you to play. However, it is never going to cost you more than £20 a head, so Breakout Liverpool is a fun and affordable way to try something new with your friends, whether it be a birthday, a staff night out or just a much-needed break from essay-writing. Read more about the missions they offer and book in for a game here. Or, if you're not local to Liverpool, Breakout also have a centre in Manchester.

Have you visited Breakout Liverpool/Manchester yet? Did you escape?

Frances x

*DISCLOSURE: We were kindly invited along by the Breakout team to escape from a room for free in return for an honest review.