Present, in February 2023, were: The Ant, Aunty Ant

Sometimes, chatting to the uninitiated about Escape Rooms, they suggest that they think it might be a boring hour, locked in a room, made to do Sudoku to open a load of padlocks? Not much fun. So, as a point of reference, from now on, I refer them to DarkMaster’s Into The Reliquary.

This referral is a harder thing to do within an actual review, as it would be quite spoiler-heavy. And, as the complete gob-smackingly crazy scale of this room is its great strength, it would be unfair to take that away. Suffice to say, this room really does push the envelope over what you can achieve in a warehouse in rural East Sussex.

The concept – actually, I can’t totally remember the concept. Retrieving an artefact from the Peruvian jungle is the gist, I’m not sure it all tracks after that point. But it doesn’t really matter, as the whirl of adventure quickly overtakes any real logic.

I’ve been in quite a few bonkers sets for Escape Rooms. This has to be the most nuts, even beating DarkMaster’s own aeroplane in One Wing. Everything has been thrown at it, with one more surprise just when you think they can’t do any more. It is an incredible feat of engineering and I’ve no idea how they managed half of it.

Bear in mind the warnings that come with this room. “You may get wet” – yep, Aunty Ant’s sock and sleeves can testify to that. There’s a reason why the walkie-talkies are waterproofed, as we demonstrated. “You may get dirty” – we were finding sand in surprising places for days. It is very physical, crawling and climbing are just touching the surface of that. To be fair, Aunty Ant did nearly all the superhero work and I was able to take the “guy in the chair” role to some extent, so it is not a case where the whole team has to be agile. But at least one is essential.

Puzzle-wise though, this didn’t really hit the mark for me. It has a lot of temple-y elements that I love; symbols, codes and inscriptions, but much of it felt like a struggle (this was game six of the weekend, which may have been a factor). But it was quite search-heavy and in a way that felt too random. At one point, gathering a clue, I knocked a very small item into the undergrowth. I assumed it was just set-dressing, but then instinct made me retrieve it. It was a crucial part of a later puzzle. This was not the only instance of this and I’m not sure important items should be quite that vulnerable to chance. One of the decoding sections also felt unnecessarily messy, like a fairly nice straight-forward puzzle had been sabotaged to make it more challenging. And a block-shuffle game was simply frustrating, eventually needing a manual override.

So, not quite the awe-inspiring game to match the awe-inspiring set. But I will still hold this up as an amazing standard of the immersion and excitement that Escape Rooms can achieve. It might not have been the most satisfying solve, but it was an incredibly fun adventure, and certainly not a boring hour locked in a room.

• Storyline: Find the thing. Did we find the thing? Dunno. Had fun though.
• Theming and Set: Absolutely spectacular, and not just all window-dressing either.
• Searching: Very search-heavy.
• Puzzles: Very much secondary to the set. More tasks than puzzles.
• Physicality: This is not a beach holiday. Prepare to work.
• Scare factor: A few possible triggers – dark space, heights, bugs (so many bugs). But all in good spirit, no horror scares.
• Company Age Guidance: “Due to the complexity of the puzzles and the nature of the special effects in all of our rooms we no longer allow children under 12. We cannot allow under 17s in our rooms without an accompanying adult due to health and safety precautions. A child for booking purposes is aged 12 – 16 inclusive.”
• Age suitability: A game where young teens with a bit of ER experience could be really helpful as long as they are respectful of the set.

DarkMaster website

Also at this venue: Shamleys; OneWing Airlines