Ever since i played Into The Reliquary and was made to walk past the entrance to Shamley’s I’ve been desperate to play it and having to wait a month or two after it opened due to work really made this visit quite exciting for me. I haven’t played a room in a good two months and all I’ve seen are good reviews, so the anticipation and expectation was very high. We were greeted by our lovely host Ana and explained the usual health and safety about the room.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead!
Before you enter the room you are given your shrink sweet. This will shrink you so you can explore the room and find the weapon that has been shrunk and hidden in the room by the Dark Master. Our job is to find the weapon and stop it from being used. We get let into the shop front and our game begins.
Each of the rooms is inspired and themed around a different toy or game with other toys and games hinted or used as puzzles. The first room is themed to a shop front but the puzzles have a Monoopoly theme (yes I spelt that right as that is their version). We did need a little nudge at a puzzle in here because it wasn’t obvious to us until we were told to look for something. We eventually solved all the puzzles in this room and we unlocked the dolls house.
This room had a giant dolls house inside it and a lot of boxes and crates we had to unlock each of which contained a different toy or game. I loved the idea of using Othello to create a code. Very clever. We solved all the crates and boxes and found a key for a door in the dolls house. We unlocked the door and the main door in this room opened. It was a very clever way of unlocking the door.
The next room started as an army game. It felt like a war was happening and with big army men toys littered around the first part of the room. We solved a couple of puzzles and the weather changed in the room. We opened up the rest of the room and were greeted by a giant game of Battleships without the ships. Instead it was picnic themed and was such a fun game to play. We won our game of battle picnic and opened the last and probably my favourite game of the entire escape room.
Huge spoilers ahead for the end of the game. You have been warned again!
We entered the room and it was a padded room with a giant crocodile in it. Yes, you read that right, a giant crocodile. A little soundtrack played and the crocodiles mouth opened revealing teeth. We were playing Crocodile Dentist! You had to work out the correct order to pull out the teeth. We worked out the correct order and his throat opened to reveal the weapon. The only way out however was to be eaten so we took it in turns to enter the crocodiles mouth and down the slide into the giant ball pit at the bottom. It was such a fun way to end a room and one that I will remember for a while. But the question. As always with escape rooms, how did we do?
We were a group of four in this game. It’s a 90 minute room and we managed to escape in 81 minutes and 2 seconds putting us in second place on the Monthly leaderboard. I honestly came out of this room smiling and laughing because it was just so much fun. The puzzles were the right level of difficulty to make you stop to think without getting frustrated or annoyed and the sets inside are just beautifully detailed. I can’t recommend this room enough. We just want to say thanks to the staff at Dark Master for being so awesome too!