When you think of Reading you don't think The Great Fire of London, except if you've visited TimeTrap Escape Rooms in the heart of the city centre. TimeTrap is home to three rooms. These are their new room Curiouser and Curiouser 1871, an Alice through the looking glass themed room, Station X 1942, a Bletchley Park themed room and Pudding Lane 1666, the room we were there to play. We were greeted at the door by our host/games master David who from the get go was on top form. He was enthusiastic and energetic and just so upbeat and positive. It was such a warm welcome and it energised us for our room. He explained the usual health and safety and general escape room stuff as well as some things about the room and then he handed us a bag and led us to the streets of London.
Holy Cow! My mouth dropped upon walking through the door. The level of immersion and theming in this room is mind utterly stunning. The flickering orange lights against the darkness of the room and the smoke wafting around immediately immersed us into the room and we genuinely felt like we were on the streets of a burning London. David asked us to sit on a bench just inside the door so he could explain the story of the room. The fire has been raging for two days and Londoners were blaming everyone. The only person who knew the truth was Thomas Farriner, the baker from Pudding Lane who was in hiding on Mincing Lane. Robert Hubert, a french man, had been arrested on suspicion of starting the fire and only Thomas Farriner's confession would set him free. Our job was to find the confession and post it through the letterbox of the church. And with that our game begun.
Straight away you are thrown into the streets of Mincing Lane and the shops that reside on it. As you solved puzzles more things would unlock and open up making the room grow as the story developed. The range of puzzles throughout the entire room was so much fun as there is both physical and mental puzzles as well as surprising puzzles that you wouldn't necessarily think would be in a room. All i'm going to say is that freakin' cheese was heavy. Another thing I loved about the puzzles is that the further into the room you got you would still have to go back to an area you've already done to help solve the puzzles. It really did utilise every area of the room and I was extremely blown away by them. Obviously we don't want to spoil any of the puzzles so that's all you are getting from me.
You know you've enjoyed a room when you have lost track of time and don't care if you escaped or not. You just have an hour that was fun, immersive and just fabulous. That being said, it was great to find out that our little team of three had managed to escape in 55 minutes and 56 seconds. All I can say is thank you so much to everyone involved with creating Pudding Lane 1666 and to David our host for genuinely making this such a wonderful experience and I am so very excited to come back and experience the other two rooms soon.
For more information about the rooms on offer at Timetrap as well as to book tickets you can visit the TimeTrap website.
Thank you for reading.