We rounded off our three-escape-rooms-in-a-day trip to Birmingham with a trip to Exciting Game for their horror room Fun House. Our first two rooms at Clue Escape had been fairly traditional escape rooms with locks and
Tim had abandoned us by this point, as he’s not one for horror rooms – not, I should note, that Ed or I were particularly into them! I’ve done two horror experiences previously, and the horror aspect has a way of shutting down the puzzly part of my brain, so I mostly see horror games as giving an extra challenge compared to normal rooms. However, I am also a huge wimp and knew I would freak out hugely when those elements appeared…
We had never done a room with a live actor before, so when we saw that offered for an additional £4, we decided (against our better judgement) that this was the time to give it a go.
Exciting Game
Sadly, our welcome to Exciting Game was not the best experience I’d had. We got inside and were greeted briefly by one of the hosts, but the staff seemed very busy with getting rooms set up and mostly left us to our own devices until 10 minutes after our game was due to start. Since there were train strikes on that day that affect our last train back, this put extra pressure on us to escape on time!
But when our host Becca did introduce herself, she was very energetic and friendly, with a great patter about the room that got us excited to get inside. We stashed our kit, got blindfolded and tentatively made our way into the darkened room…
Fun House
Mr Crimson was the owner of a sought-after fun house in a small town. His fun house was like no other. It put the player’s skills and wit to the test .
He built this place for his son, whom he loved very much. His wife was a wonderful woman too. They were just a lovely family. Mr Crimson was the happiest man, and his fun house was the happiest place you could ever visit. Until…
The family went on a trip in late August. Only Mr Crimson returned. His wife and son passed away in a car accident.
Mr Crimson was not the same anymore. He not only lost his family, but he lost his soul too. He started to collect haunted toys and ornaments to bring his family back from the dead.
Something changed about the Fun House too. It became a cold, dark place.
Strange things started happening. Those who entered the Fun House were never seen again. Nor was Mr Crimson…
Do you have what it takes to get out?
~ Fun House, Exciting Game
Theming
Once we had our blindfolds off and were on with exploring, it was clear to see that this room had a high level of attention to detail, and a LOT to discover.
Even the clock in the room, rather than counting down the time we had left, was instead counting towards midnight – after which Becca had told us we would be trapped in the fun house forever!
The horror element of the room absolutely struck the right balance for me. Rather than being interrupted every few minutes with jump scares, early on the creepy elements are kept to an unnerving background presence. But that’s not to say that we weren’t scared witless at one point! When they brought the terror, they REALLY brought the terror. I’m not sure how scary the room would have been without the addition of the live actor – probably more on the unnerving end of the spectrum.
The only thing the room was missing was being in theme during the voice-over clues – while Becca’s voice was friendly and helpful, it might have been a fun touch to have the voice of our “tour guide” over the tannoy instead.
Puzzles
The puzzles in this room were very creative and interest, relying on lots of different skills and out-of-the-box thinking. There were a lot of multi-layer puzzles, where you needed to piece together elements from different places, which are my favourite type of puzzles to see in an escape room.
The room was incredibly branching and as there were only two of us, there were multiple puzzles that we solved completely independently. Individual puzzles weren’t too tricky overall, but there were definitely some headscratchers that required both our brainpower to get to a solution.
There was at least one puzzle that would have been made significantly harder if the horror aspect of the room had been amped up while working on it. I’m very glad that the room didn’t use scares during that time to artificially inflate the difficulty of the room.
Unfortunately there was one puzzle that got jammed and wouldn’t open properly, but this didn’t have a major impact on our experience as Becca relayed the information it contained.
Summary
A clever room with interesting and varied puzzles, which uses its horror elements to enhance the experience well.
Theme: 4.5/5 | Puzzles: 4.5/5 | Difficulty: 4/5
Clue system: voice-over
Success: yes, 17:20 remaining
