iLocked – Alien

iLocked – Alien.
Location: Nottingham
Game Date 17/10/2017

Theme:
“Our Alien escape room sends teams into the future, to the year 2224. Players are astronauts flying a spaceship back to Earth from the planet Next. Suddenly, the ship’s self-destruct system reports unknown biomaterial. Aliens! Players have to get rid of them, but it won’t be easy. How can disaster be averted? Players have to race through the spaceship’s numerous modules, where they will find lots of things to investigate. Will they be able to use the space technology correctly? That depends on whether they can fight off the invading aliens. Players have just one hour to get out. This space horror-themed escape game is great fun for family and friend teams”

Theming in Alien was fantastic, clearly a lot of effort had been put into the decor and theme, and I felt like I had boarded a spaceship… very immersive and impressive.
The space was large enough for 6 players, with lots of nooks and crannys to explore.

Game Play:
The game started off so, so well.
With good logical puzzles that utilised tech that would be fitting of a spaceship. Most of the puzzles we encountered were tech based and code breaking with a couple of physical, real life puzzles thrown in.
Unfortunately for us in the latter half of the game we encountered a mis-set, which resulted in us stalling for quite a while, until the mis-set was fixed (automatically by the game somehow…) This resulted in us getting something too early, messing up the flow of the game, and then we had a technology problem which prevented us from accessing a computer (after we had the password, the password worked and then the software failed?!)
I feel as if I can’t pass comment on the puzzles of flow of the second half of the game as we were confused as a team from the mis-set and resulting technological problems.
The first half however was very, very enjoyable. Had lovely puzzles, great use of tech and a smooth flow. Alien had the potential to be a very highly rated game, it’s such a shame that the tech problems marred this game and left us deflated.
I can recommend Alien, I really liked the first half of the game, It’s a new game and maybe highlights that whilst tech is snazzy, if it goes wrong it can upset and throw off the entire game. So maybe give it a couple of months to bed in and become stable.

Clue System:
Clues were delivered via a walkie talkie

Game Host:
Marat was our Game Host and Owner of iLocked.

Did we escape?
Yes, even with the tech problems we managed an escape in 48 minutes.

Website:
Price:
4 Players £76
5 Players £88
6 Players £102