Houdini’s Escape Room Experience Avis 

We played the ‘Sneaky Finders’ escape room in Bristol and were extremely disappointed. We are an experienced group who have played many escape rooms over the years, and this was easily the weakest one we’ve encountered.

The room is very poorly designed in terms of pacing and player engagement. It is highly linear, meaning only one or two people are involved at any given time while the rest of the group is left standing around with nothing to do. This resulted in long periods of boredom and made the experience feel slow and badly thought out. That should never happen in an escape room.

Several challenges are also overly physical and luck based rather than focused on logic or problem solving. As a result, much of the team was reduced to watching others struggle, which was frustrating and dull. Escape rooms should reward teamwork and clever thinking, this one did not.

We also encountered issues with worn or poorly maintained props, which made some tasks harder than they should have been. For a paid experience, this level of upkeep is unacceptable.

Immersion was frequently broken as well, including a moment where the game host had to enter the room to help, completely pulling us out of the experience.
Overall, the room relies almost entirely on its theme rather than delivering interesting or satisfying puzzles. The gameplay feels underdeveloped and lacking in care. This is especially disappointing coming from a large chain, where a higher level of creativity and polish should be expected.

Given the price, this felt like very poor value for money, and we would not recommend this room to others.

Our experience at DERBY 'Space Break: Escape from USS Redemption' was a total waste of time and money. Despite booking as a team of three, the small rooms only contained two individual cells, so only two of us can stand there, this left one of us standing outside with nothing to do just waiting while the other two worked on puzzle. the puzzle itself completely senseless did not involve an intellectual. But If there were only two cells in the room and cannot accommodate three people, it shouldn't be available for such a booking online.

The communication system was equally frustrating. We were given a radio to talk to a supposedly AI,' but it was just a staff member pretending to be a robot. Between the terrible signal inside the cells and the staff member’s forced 'robot' voice, it were nearly impossible to understand.

We spent the entire session stuck in those cells until someone simply walked in and told us time was up.

Charging nearly £80 for this is a joke. Additionally, they force you to sign a waiver upon arrival that prevents you from claiming a refund, obviously this can not be acceptable experience and most people will demand a refund. Even the minors details will be shared on waiver form. When type in the waiver form, other previous users email addresses will appear as recommended because these were saved in device. GDPR alert. This waiver form as a requirement that is conveniently never mentioned during the online booking process. I feel completely conned. Stay Away. Do not waste your hard earned money.

Immersive experience, themed environments where players solve puzzles and complete tasks within a set time limit, usually an hour. The objective is to "escape" by unraveling the mystery or storyline using teamwork and logical thinking.

That’s what they promise and charge £27 per person for.

They don’t deliver this. The room itself was strongly lit, so little atmoaphere or scare factor. The team member basically answered/passed them through sections they couldn’t get through due to faulty mechanics/workings systems. This happened on a several occasions. They are a young couple who chose this expensive activity as a ‘birthday’ treat. Have minimal spare money, as do many of us currently, and in addiiton have a young baby. They weren’t confident to complain at the time. Reported all their issues to me as they left the activity and asked if I would help them out in a complaint by email.
On looking at Trust Pilot whilst compiling the complaint to TenPin, it was evident that many may others have had similar issues.
Lo and behold TenPin will not consider reimbursing them. They offered for them to come back again free of charge. As the nature of the email response was ‘well you didn’t complain at the time’ they feel they couldn’t trust it would be any different and worried that it would be awkward as far as dealing with the same staff was concerned. They have limited spare time due to work and getting babysitting cover. Despite them saying they couldn’t do bowling as an alternative due to a long term back issue and they karaoke was definitely not something they would be comfortable doing, Ten Pin refused to reimburse.

Please please don’t waste your money- use Enigma rooms in Doncaster instead. Used them several times before and was a fabulous experience.

Response back …… forward my issues with details to exactly same email address I sent my complaint to in first place who re directed to the venue in Doncaster who declined a refund!!!!

We played the Space Break escape room today at Tenpin Southampton, and unfortunately the experience fell well below expectations.

To start on a positive note, the host was polite and helpful throughout the session. However, communication was often difficult, especially when the sirens were activated, as it became very hard to hear instructions or interact verbally.

The game itself lacked the flow that you would expect from a well-designed escape room. Progression was heavily dependent on verbal interaction rather than physical or logical problem-solving. For example, you had to shout passwords or answers out loud for the host to unlock doors or open hatches. This became frustrating, particularly due to the noise levels and poor acoustics in the room.

The room was extremely dark, to the point where having a phone flashlight felt essential. Without it, I don’t believe you would get anywhere close to completing the room. This took away from immersion and made solving tasks unnecessarily difficult.

More concerning was the overall condition of the room. The escape room felt tired and in need of maintenance. Several tasks didn’t work properly, and there were broken structures with exposed sharp pins and cracked plastic, which posed a safety concern. On top of this, the room was visibly dirty and in desperate need of a deep clean.

In summary, we didn’t enjoy our escape room experience at Tenpin Southampton. The room was not fit for the general public, was poorly maintained, unhygienic, and lacked a coherent game flow. The verbal mechanics were especially problematic given the sirens and overall noise levels. I wouldn’t return to this establishment for an escape room experience.

That said, I would happily return to Houdinis Escape Room, based on our consistently positive experiences at their other locations.

I would recommend the Houdini escape rooms but do have one small gripe. I do find that when I do escape rooms in places like Birmingham there are a lot of damages to the room. I understand that this can happen but it means that some clues don’t quite work in the way they should and some bits are missing etc which detracts from the overall experience. We did the titanic escape room in star city Birmingham and whilst we did escape there were a number of tasks that just didn’t work. A handle was missing/ the code machine didn’t work/ the door practically fell off mid game. It’s not a cheap day out and we do love them but it’s the little things that matter.

The staff were great - supportive and helpful, and played their characters well. However, we played two rooms and in both there were two HUGE problems:
1) clearly content had been broken and therefore skipped. Open lockers, clues that went nowhere, and a lack of clarity in what to do. The tools and content were really badly damaged and hard to use. At one point we had the host ask us to return a hidden item that had fallen out of its box unprompted. One room we finished because a lock was not opening as so the host took us out; the other we finished with the host letting us out before we completed a final puzzle he clearly didn’t know about….
2) the puzzles were either utterly illogical or too easy (probably because of the skips mentioned above). There wasn’t a good flow to what we were doing and it was just annoying by the end.
It’s too expensive to get away with this stuff, team. You can’t charge people £27 a head for a room they either can’t finish to is so broken they best in in 30 minutes. Put a bit of money and effort into uplifting your rooms and this will be a great place to visit, but right now - avoid it.

2.30 on 23/11/24 - Guy answering main phone line was unhelpful and extremely rude. He refused to explain which games were appropriate for my group of teenagers and put the phone down on me twice.

Really disappointed that they're apparently 'unable' to even partially honour a Groupon code that had expired because of circumstances beyond my control.

We took a group for a 13th birthday escape room experience, to Room 13 Greenwich. The girls enjoyed it at the time, so I gave two stars instead of one, but we found it terribly disappointing given it cost over £200, It was not at all scary as we were expecting. Once inside the story/scenario didn't really fit that described on the website. The host was nice but overall the experience was so lame. The padlocks were fiddly so even using the correct codes they didn't open, which resulted in so much wasted time. We have been to other escape rooms where things were a lot slicker, with varied clues and better tech where the staff helping really were involved through role play. Disappointing, don't waste your money, we won't be going back.

Rubbish and waste of time very rude and not professional I booked a week advance and I wanted to cancel 1 person which they said you can cancel but you will not get your refund

Booked an escape room in Gloucester, but forgot the code, for discount and free pizza, called to ask if code could be used, was told not. After a polite email on my part they have kindly honoured the code. Thanks this has changed my review and my repeat custom

Completed almost all of the rooms in Nottingham! Favorites were Poppa blocks definitely made us laugh! Rms Titanic was great fun and would even recommend Alcatraz. Can't wait to try the last room Extinct. In a great location inside a bowling place plus arcade and right next to deluxe cinema. So definitely a fun day out!