Tag Archives: escapologic

Late September news updates

Newspaper graphicA few short news stories and they’re all good news, so without further ado:

  • Escape Plan Ltd. report that their lease has been extended until late January 2016, so there’s longer to enjoy their current game in its present location. Celebrate this good news by using the launch discount code, which will spiral into infinity for good when business closes on Friday night.
  • Excited to see Play-it-Real, an English language blog on exit games by the owner of one in Amsterdam. It’s only two posts old, but Exit Games UK really loved the Play-it-Real recap of attending the convention in Germany three weeks ago. Not much has been written about what happened there, making this article a must-read.
  • Only four days to go for the crowdfunding campaign for the Red House Mysteries exit game in Exeter. The campaign has come on in leaps and bounds over the last two or three days and is now well past 90% funded. While you can’t take anything for granted, you would be disappointed if your ticket pre-orders at extremely attractive-looking prices weren’t to come to fruition from this point.
  • Good news about new games coming at sites in Nottingham: Escapologic are opening their third room, E.P.I Centre on Saturday; it’s a game about compound interest, or at least about an interesting compound. Alma City has just been hit by an earthquake. There’s panic on the streets. Chaos and devastation. Buildings are collapsing. Fires are raging. People are screaming. Cars are crashing. Your team is the disaster cleanup crew. You have one hour to save billions of pounds of chemical research from the Edward Palamate Institute. Stabilise the systems. Save the priceless chemical sample. Get out before the contents of your cryogenic case disperse and it’s all over. Elsewhere in the city, the second room at Cryptology, which is set to put the crypt into Cryptology, “will be ready for an October launch”. Good times!
  • And finally, Agent November used Twitter to confirm the announcement that the intellectual property for the well-known large-scale zombie chase game 2.8 Hours Later has been bought from the sadly insolvent Slingshot. The zombies may yet run again; it will be rather exciting to see what a company that is used to smarter games might do to refresh the familiar concept!

Hatches, a match and an underground patch

Cartoon of people reading newspapers and a bookSome quick news stories:

1) This site has previously discussed Escapologic of Nottingham and gamEscape of Liverpool as locations opening soon; happily, both launched as planned on Friday 1st May. They look cool as well as being exciting additions to both of their cities; best of luck to them both.

A couple of weird coincidences: there are only two exit games in the UK whose names include the word “logic”, and they’re both in Nottingham. This site is also not quite sure where to put the stress in either of the names (EscaPOlogic? EscapoLOgic? EscaPOLOgic? GamEScape? GAMEscape?) when you pronounce either of them out loud. No matter!

2) The Room opened in Glasgow only four weeks ago, but already it has hosted its first proposal! Congratulations to the happy couple, and to The Room as well. This isn’t the first exit game to host a proposal; the Breakout Manchester Twitter was appropriately joyous when they hosted theirs, and it seems far more likely than not that other sites have hosted proposals as well. This site only hopes that exit games have hosted more proposals than they have caused divorces.

3) Last March, in the first dozen days or so of the life of the site, this site pondered whether there might ever be an exit game in a deep-level shelter, far beneath the streets of London. Entirely seriously, something rather similar to this might become an option. Transport for London recently announced that its “Commercial Development team are looking for third party partners to develop innovative commercial projects across Underground, Rail and Surface Transport assets“. The current opportunity is one of the most evocative of them all: Down Street station, on the Piccadilly line until it was closed over 80 years ago; Wikipedia notes that it was “used by prime minister Winston Churchill and his war cabinet until the Cabinet War Rooms were ready for use“.

TfL will be launching a Down Street station bidders’ conference to launch the tender process; the brochure (6 MB .pdf) invites you, among other things, to “Imagine a truly immersive theatrical production performed in front of a small, exclusive audience” in part of the lift shaft. If there can be a theatrical production, there can be an exit game, either there or in any of several other parts of the facility – and, with the right story, maybe one with as much authenticity as it gets. This site gets the impression that it wouldn’t be cheap, but if the right site ever thought about Going Underground, this might be the ideal opportunity.

Bonus! 4) Considering the world’s biggest sporting event taking place this evening, Escape Live win huge timeliness and topicality points for this delightful pun.

Coming soon to Nottingham: Escapologic

Escapologic logoEscapologic is set to blend escapology with logic when this new exit game opens in Nottingham on May 1st. Situated on Castle Gate, a couple of hundred metres south of the Old Market Square tram stop, the site will launch with two games – and correspondence suggests two more may well be on their way.

The site promises movie-quality special effects and completely realistic set and sound design, with machines to build and operate, hidden switches to find and codes to crack. The first two rooms have one-hour time limits and are designed to be played by teams of two to five; prices have not been revealed, but it has been suggested the price range will be £40 for two players up to £80 for teams of five. You are invited to choose between an abandoned steampunk inspired laboratory or a horror-filled crypt for the first two games.

The former of these, entitled Con-trap-tion, sets the scene like so: The room is dark. A single beam of light illuminates a key on a desk… In the shadows, strange machinery creaks and groans. Half-blinded by the spotlight, you make your way towards the key, stumbling on unidentifiable contraptions, apparently left in haste by whoever has been here before you… In the deep darkness at the end of the room, something is crouching under a huge tarpaulin…

Alternatively, Crypt-ic is the second game, where Stepping in to the room medieval age seeps through the draping and tapestries adorning the castle stone walls. Weaponry and Armour dating back centuries hold their own dark secrets and stories, however; it is the ominous looking machine that dominates the room and captures intrigue. To the right are shackled doors, which offer a glimpse through to a further chamber which can only have dark intentions…

These sound like remarkable places to play and this site is really intrigued to see whether the puzzles and challenges match up to the atmospheric surroundings. The coming soon page‘s countdown timer shows the attention to detail, happily following up on this site’s opinion on the most steampunk things in the world. Definitely one to watch very closely!