Last week my boss told us that he wanted to arrange a fun evening for everyone in the office at an Escape Room. I’d never done one before but I have been wanting to for quite a while now, so I was super excited to go.

If you haven‘t heard of escape rooms before, you and a group of friends are basically locked in a room for an hour and you have a series of clues or riddles to help you get out. There are loads of Escape Rooms opening up across the country, and each one will be different, with different themes or storylines, clues and difficulty levels. Ours was rated at 3/5 difficulty level and was called ‘The Governor’. I won’t give away too much detail in case you go there yourself, but it followed the story of a man who escaped a haunted prison and had left clues to help us escape too!

Our group gathered in the foyer and were greeted by one of the hosts. He told us the rules of the game; that we had an hour to escape, that we would be monitored closely (so we would never truly be locked in; it’s very safe!) and that we would get 3 clues to help us if we needed them. 

We were then blindfolded and handcuffed to each other before being led into ‘prison’. When we were instructed to remove the blindfolds we realised that we weren't all in the same prison cell! So problem number one was, how on earth do we all join up together again?! Eventually someone managed to find a key and we unlocked our cuffs and then needed to figure out the lock combinations. Around the room were numbers, poems, messages and riddles which looked as though they had been carved into the wall by previous cell mates. We tried literally every combination we could think of and eventually we opened the doors separating us from each other and we could continue the game as a group. 

It was a lot bigger than I had expected! I thought we would literally be locked in one room, but when we figured out another code, it led us down a hallway to another secret room with more locks to break, crawling through tunnels to find a hidden morse code message, and then down a stairway with 'laser beams' which we had to duck and dive through without setting off the alarms. Eventually we made it out with just 7 SECONDS left to spare. It was SO close to the mark, which really got our adrenaline going! 

I was so impressed with the level of thought that must have been required to put together such a complex series of clues to escape. Not one member of the group was left out, and equally, not one member of the group was doing everything. We naturally all had our strengths and we all worked together to escape. It was a really good team building exercise, particularly for us 3 newbies that started working at the office last month!

The Governor can be found at The Chelmsford Escape Roomsand cost us £15 per head, but as I said, there are lots of other similar escape rooms scattered across the country.