The Sunday of our escape room trip saw our little group head to Broadstairs in Kent to visit The Escapement. They have two rooms here in Atlantis and Wunderwaffe Operation Quartz and we played both but this reverie is for the latter and was our first room of the day.
We arrived slightly early and not with our full team and our host James greeted us in character and right from the start we knew this was going to be good as he immediately started to rip into us as a group. The banter we had was just so funny. Anyway, he took us upstairs and told us to sit on the crates as he explained the room ;-
"Travel back through time to the abandoned Quartz laboratory. Located in a bomb shelter in Broadstairs, this laboratory has been kept secret for decades. Only recently discovered by The Network; the highest order of military intelligence. There's no official government documentation of the Quartz Machine but rumours describing an artificially intelligent machine, engineered by a German nuclear physicist hellbent on causing world chaos have been leaked. We now need a brave team to go head to head with Quartz in order to destroy its physical construct and annihilate it from the world, for good."
Warning: Potential Spoilers Ahead
We were then let into the room. We watched a couple of videos explaining the devices in the room and immediately split up to start solving the puzzles. There was a great mix of puzzles in the room and they varied in difficulty but we smashed through them. I must admit I adored the huge reference to Alan Turing's Engima machine, especially as it felt right being part of the game. We managed to open up a hatch that would then then help us to open a door to the next corridor. We quickly solved this room and we then entered the finale room. The finale is what makes this room so damn memorable and up there as the best finale to any escape room i've ever done.
This next part will contain huge spoilers for the ending. Do not read if you don't't want it ruined!
We entered the last room and are greet by two guns and a giant robot. A short video sequence plays and the robot becomes active and starts trying to destroy the world. It was time for the boss battle. We had to use the guns to fire balls at targets on the wall behind. This would lower the health of Quartz (The robot). He would then roll closer to the cage where you would have to stab him with some poles with shapes on the end to lower his health more. It genuinely was nerve wrecking and we had to work as a team to defeat Quartz as quickly as possible. I am not doing this ending justice as it was just insane. But did we save the world in time.
The room is a 90 minute room and we managed to do it in 45 minutes and 50 seconds which is amazing. Even though we smashed it I can honestly say it never felt boring. It as exciting and clever and funny. I want to say a huge thank you to James our host and everyone at Escapement for this room. It's so good!
For more information you can visit the Escapement website. You can also find our review of The Pit here!