Breakout Liverpool – Wanted: Indians

Breakout Liverpool – Wanted: Indians.
Location: Liverpool
Game Date 19/01/2017.
Team: Amy & Ian

So, it had been 6 months since our last visit to Breakout, believe it or not, and when a dreary Thursday looked ripe for an escape we decided to put our brave boots on and tackle Breakout Liverpool’s hardest room, which apparently has a 5% escape rate! This had always really scared me, surely this room would be the end of our decent winning streak….?

Theme:
“Wanted is a wild west themed room. Your quest in the room is to escape but you have two choices and ways to escape. Which side will you take, will you save the day as a cowboy or an Indian? Depending on your choice you will face different tasks and puzzles to complete. Which path will you take?”

The website is a little vague as to the real backstory in the room, but to summarise, we’ve been locked away for a crime, and our comrade has left us all the necessary clues we need to escape, but the Sheriff is due back in an hour! (why is it always an hour….?)

The theming was minimal, as you’d expect in a jail cell, although it did give the feeling of being in a prison (for me at least as I was totally locked up!) I was a bit disappointed to see all the wires from the CCTV camera just hanging down into the room, I don’t normally point stuff like this out, but I can just see a team pulling on the wires and ruining the CCTV, as people can get quite destructive in escape rooms, it also did ruin the immersion a bit!

Once we were free from the jail cell we ended up in the space shared with the Cowboys side, looking from the other side the theming looked great, with western saddles and a real WORKING piano in the room and a proper animal skin rug (hopefully fake!) the theming in the second half of the game was a lot better, and still… in the suspension of disbelief we’ll ignore the stainless steel sink 😉

I have to mention the soundtrack, a great mix of “western” themed songs… including “cotton eye jo” – gotta love that!

Game Play:
The game was fairly linear, towards the end of the game it did open up slightly more with a few puzzles coming together at a similar time.
The puzzles were a good mix of logic, maths, physical, observational and word, it really seemed to have one of each!
I’ve read other reviews who have talked about huge logic leaps in the puzzles. I personally didn’t find this to be the case at all, the puzzles were quite straight forward and we only over thought one as the lock didn’t quite pop on our first try of the (actual) correct answer! (which we wasted 10 minutes on, argh)
That being said, the puzzles were all similar things we’ve seen before (as is a risk when you’ve played nearly 80 games!) nothing really groundbreaking but all good solid puzzles!
Enthusiasts will enjoy the flow of this game, and although we didn’t find it as hard as it was purported to be, we still enjoyed the puzzles and logical thinking they required!
New players will find this trickier, but only for the reason that they may have not come across many of the puzzles in this room before.

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via a screen in the room

Game Host:
Mike was our Game Host, and was great, even down to reassuring us when he called to see where we were… he handled it perfectly (turns out somehow I had booked 18:00 when I thought I’d booked 19:30 – luckily when he called we were just parking the car as we’d gone over to Liverpool early, crisis averted)
During the game he sent us a few clues, some of which we had already sorted, so were more like confirmations we were heading in the right direction, I think the lack of mics in the room doesn’t help, if breakout had mics it would make the game hosts’ life so, so much easier…
Saying that- Mike was a great host, he seemed to know the industry well and has designed Breakout’s newest game “The Heist” – which we will be doing soon (and we will request Mike to game host!!)

Did we escape?
Yes, in 40 minutes, and had we been 1 min 30 seconds quicker we’d have beaten the record for the room! Damn!

Website:www.breakoutliverpool.com
Price:
2 Players £36 (£40 peak)
3 Players £45 (£48 peak)
4 Players £56 (£60 peak)
5 Players £60 (£70 peak)