The best escape rooms: London 2020
We round up the most mind-boggling and fully immersive escape room games London has to offer
HiddenCity: three immersive adventures across London
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Immersive adventure connoisseur HiddenCity offers several critically-acclaimed escapades, providing thrilling entertainment for adventure-hungry Londoners. Swapping the conventional escape room setting for the streets of London, each experience invites you to choose your own path through the story, interacting with characters along the way. There are three adventures to choose from: The Hunt for the Cheshire Cat, Moriarty’s Game: The Professor’s Invitation and The Enchanted Mirror. Following clues delivered by text, each small group (of two to five players) must immerse themselves in challenges that ‘open up parts of the city you never knew existed’, and, ultimately, affect the way their story unfolds.
Group size: 2-5 players
Time to escape: 1.5 - 2.5 hours
Cost: £19pp
The Game is Now: Sherlock Escape Room, Shepherd's Bush
The creators of the BBC's hit Sherlock series invite us to play detective. The Game is Now escape room combines Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's intriguing story-telling, sets crafted by the Sherlock series production company and expertise from escape room veterans Time Run. The result is impressively authentic and puzzling.
Set in multiple rooms across a large, labyrinthine space in Shepherd's Bush, this escape room experience feels bigger-budget than most (and inevitably is costs more, too). But the narrative and challenges reflect the high quality props and spaces, resulting in a memorable and brain-bending adventure.
Group size: 4 – 6 players
Time to escape: 100 minutes
Cost: £54
Breakin’ Escape Rooms, Highbury & Islington
There are no fewer than seven heavily-themed rooms here. You and your fellow team members can attend a wizarding school where you’ll need to learn spells to charm your way through a series of tests; help a superhero defend his city against an evil genius; solve a mystery with Sherlock himself; escape a pirate ship before becoming a member of its ‘undead’ crew; overthrow a regime in space; escape your cannibalistic lecturer’s lair; or join a gang of street racers and take part in a major bank heist. The rooms are ranked by difficulty, helping you find the right challenge for your group.
Group size: 3 – 6 players
Time to escape: 60 minutes
Cost: £23 – £35pp depending on group size and time
Enigma Quests, Moorgate
Your team can choose between two intricately designed escape rooms at Enigma Quests. The Million Pound Heist will see you break into the safehouse of a notorious gang of London criminals and try to navigate your way through top level security before attempting to enter the vault with the prize money.
Teams who prefer their fun crime-free, meanwhile, can enroll in the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where the challenge is to work as a team to pass a number of tests in order to prove your status as a witch or wizard. You’ll then use your newly-acquired magic skills to defeat the dark forces. Two further rooms at Enigma Quests – a submarine escape and interstellar escapade – are not currently available to book.
Group size: 3 – 5 people
Time to escape: 60 minutes
Cost: £30pp
AI Escape, Bermondsey
There are two rooms at Archimedes Inspiration (aka. AI Escape), both with a strong narrative focus. Kill Mad is a psychological thriller set in an abandoned and haunted hospital. Project Delta, meanwhile, is a sci-fi thriller set on board a spaceship in the year 2052. Both challenges require strong analytical skills and are not recommended for escape room novices.
Group size: 3 – 6 players for Kill Mad / 3 – 5 players for Project Delta
Time to escape: 70 minutes for Kill Mad / 100 minutes for Project Delta
Cost: £35pp for Project Delta / £26 – £30pp for Kill Mad depending on group size
Mission Breakout, Camden
With its setting in the former South Kentish Town tube station, escape room games don’t get much more immersive than Mission Breakout. The station closed its doors to the public in 1924, but rumours of ghostly presences trapped inside its tunnels linger on. One of the two escape room experiences here is The Lost Passenger, based on the story of Mr. Brackett, who alighted at South Kentish Town station when a train accidentally stopped there following the station’s closure and was never seen again.
The second is Codebreakers, which shifts the focus away from the station’s history and is instead a WWII game focused on decoding secret messages sent between the Nazis. In both games, you and your fellow team members will be locked inside a room in the historic building where you’ll work together to find clues and solve a series of puzzles in order to escape.
Group size: up to 12 players
Time to escape: 60 minutes
Cost: £28pp
Hint Hunt, Euston
Hint Hunt is London’s original set of escape rooms and is comprised of five different challenges. You and your team could work to restart the engine on a submarine before it's too late; go on a quest to find a second, sunken submarine; find evidence to prove a falsely-convicted murder suspect’s innocence; solve a robbery and escape a room in Tokyo; or prevent fraud that would leave you bankrupt – this final one can even be brought to your office and played there instead!
Group size: 3 – 5 players
Time to escape: 60 minutes
Cost: £20 – £27pp depending on group size
Escape Rooms, London Bridge
Kitted out with laser beams and strobe lighting, Escape Rooms at London Bridge have a slightly more high-tech look and feel than some of their competitors. You and your team can escape from one of two rooms: Pharaoh’s Chamber, a cursed tomb set in the heart of Egypt’s oldest pyramid, where you’ll have one hour to find the treasure flames of the gods in order to escape; and Room 33, where you’ll travel from the year 1675 in China to present day London – room 33 of the British Museum, to be precise. Here you’re tasked with searching for a missing vase in order to prevent your execution at the hands of KangXi, Emperor and great ruler of the mighty Qing Dynasty.
Group size: 3 – 7 players
Time to escape: 60 minutes
Cost: £21 – £25pp depending on group size
Escape Land, Soho
Escape Land, otherwise known as Escape Rooms London, will see your team take on one of two challenges: Right to the Throne, where you’ll puzzle over what happened to the rightful heir to the throne of an empire and work to restore peace over the land; and Da Vinci’s Exploration, where your team will take up the quest to find the Holy Grail with its promise of eternal life. You'll need to be quick, though, evil forces are working hard to find it before you.
Group size: 3 – 6 players
Time to escape: 60 minutes
Cost: £25 – £27pp depending on size of team
The Crystal Maze, West End
Perhaps the most well-known and best-loved experience of this kind in London, the Crystal Maze is a chance to don a satin bomber jacket, jump into the hit 90s TV show of the same name and muddle through a series of challenges against the clock. The premise is this: teams are guided by an eccentric maze master through four different adventure zones – Aztec, Industrial, Futuristic and Medieval – completing tasks along the way.
Group size: 1 – 7 players
Time to escape: Roughly 80 minutes
Cost: From £54.99 depending on size of team
Eltham Escape Rooms, Eltham
Eltham’s entertainment scene recently got a whole lot more exciting for puzzlers who like cracking codes, thanks to the opening of Eltham Escape Rooms. Just one of the venue's three planned rooms is currently open, though. Called Temporal Tours, the challenge in this sci-fi-themed room is to escape the 'Chronos One' ship before it explodes. A second room, Robotic Asylum, is opening soon as a two-player VR experience where players inspect a crime scene Cluedo-style. The third room is yet to be finalised, but is penciled in as a WW2 themed room based on real history and facts, where players uncover a spy ring within the British Intelligence.
Group size: 2 – 8 players
Time to escape: 60 minutes
Cost: £25pp depending on group size
The Riddle Within, Greenwich
Escape rooms experts The Riddle Within have teamed up with Studio 338, one of London’s largest clubs, to create two sky-high evasion experiences. Flight 338 takes place on a real-life plane styled as a prisoner shipping craft. It's the job of gamers to riddle their way out.
A second experience comes by way of Chernobyl: 10 Seconds to Midnight, a recreation of the HBO series based on the nuclear disaster. You and your team are in the control room on that fateful night – can you avoid the explosion this time around? Providing family-friendly and high-intensity options, The Riddle Within pitches escape mania just right.
A third ‘room’, Escaping Bad, is inspired by a certain cult TV show with a similar sounding name. The experience begins in a shady looking RV, where escapees must use codes and chemistry to cook the purest product.
Group size: up to six players
Time to escape: 75 minutes
Cost: £20 – £29pp depending on group size and time
Read more ...AIM Escape Rooms, Whitechapel
The four challenges at AIM Escape Rooms aren’t like those you will have played elsewhere. What’s more, they’re all the more chilling for being rooted in scenarios you might have seen in popular films. There’s Psychopath’s Den, a gruesome, Saw-esque horror house where players must solve ‘fiendish puzzles’ to save their skin. Then there’s Patient Zero 2150, where players must contain a bio-threat in the form of a virus let loose by rogue scientists.
At the lighthearted end of the scale, there’s Hangover Déjà Brew. Perfect for stag or hen dos, the experience asks teams to find out what happened to an AWOL groom who’s gone missing after a big night out before his wedding. And for families, there’s a spy-fuelled romp set in a restaurant, Spy Heroes, where teams must save their kidnapped friend.
Group size: 5 players
Time to escape: 60 minutes
Cost: £25 - £40pp depending on group size and time