Xscream Escapes have just opened their new Christmas themed escape room called Escape From Satan’s Grotto. This was a live actor based escape room and our mission was to save Santa who has been kidnapped by the devil and along the way we would meet elves who may help or hinder us on our mission to save Santa and Christmas.
So walking along Croydon in the middle of the high street towards Five Guys there is this little alleyway with stairs to a basement. This is where the event was located. Here we were meet by two of the team from Xscream Escapes who explained to us what we had to do. There were four rooms in total to do and each room had a time limit on it. First room we had 10mins,then 20mins,10 mins for the third room and the final room 10mins… I think. I was nominated to be the team leader of the group, or as they said, Santa’ little helper lol. I was given the timer so we could keep track of how long in each room we were and then our journey to save Santa begin. It all starts of so calm and then all hell breaks lose and things are most definitely not how they seem here.
BELOW IS FULL SPOILER REVIW… YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
So we were taken to the holding area and when our timer hit 60 we went into our first room. We were greeted by an entrance to a lodge, snow covering the floor and Christmas tress. I won’t give anything away about solving the room through, as if you go, that’s your job. After scrambling through stuff and searching for our clues, we found the correct code to let us into the lodge. As soon as the door opens we were greeted by a rather chirpy, funny and rude elf who told us to come in. We have entered the living room. There was a fire place with a reindeer on the wall. A tree lit in the corner. A tv and pictures also covered the walls. There was a lot of padlocks in this room (My nemesis) and tricky things to solve and work out too. This was one of my favourite rooms. The elf was utterly brilliant in here, from being helpful at points we needed it by dropping suttle hints to guide us. to being rather distracting and a nuisance, to being absolutely hilarious at points as well. We had a lot to do in this room. The photo that dropped from the wall had me in stitches and the jokes about baubles and bushes 😂 but with a little help with the final piece, we opened up the fire place.
This is where things turn from the fun and chirpy to dark, sinister and twisted. We entered through the fireplace and into a room covered in graffiti with two tunnels. We realised we would have to split up, so we did. This puzzle was the hardest one to work out for sure, but we were soon joined by a rather naughty, curious, creepy and cheeky elf who appeared out of no where They decided to try and help us in these tunnels. They also decided to take my handbag too 😂 and was at one point in my way but said climb over them so I did haha. After a lot of frustraion and a lot of shouting we opened the door to our next room.
This is definitely were things took a much darker turn as we entered the room Santa was locked up in. He was in a cage with the elf very excitedly jumping on top of it. We had to find the key to release the padlock on the cage. It had some very tricky and clever puzzles in this room. Our elf became more unhelpful and Santa was shouting abuse at us! After a lot of time we worked out the clues and got the padlocks to the chain undone. We got the chain free and I undone the padlock to free Santa. I soon regretted that decision and we found another key to open a box. A head fell out as soon as I opened the box. We turn around and there’s Santa with a chainsaw in his hands. I pushed the button for us to escape and run out of there.This was my other favourite room too! I never thought I would be putting my hand down a pipe, it was disgusting. The elf keept closing the doors on one of the clues 😂 I could not help but laugh and get frustrated but they did help out when I could not get a padlock undone lol. After catching our breath we managed to escape with 10mins spare as a team of two.
We loved what the team at Xscream Escapes have done here. All hidden away under Croydons busy high street. It honestly was such fun. Everything was good, the rooms were well themed and the puzzles we had to do were not easy but not to hard either and their acting team were really good. Also massive shout out the the XScream guys who already said as we arrived they were running behind but it was really nice to have a chat with the team before and after the event. They made us feel incredibly welcome, set the mood perfectly before we went in and defo a tiny bit of false sense of security to lol. I will never trust or see Santa and his elves the same again. Amazing night, really good fun and definitely get down there if you can as I’m very glad I did not miss out on it this time.