Escape rooms are an amazing activity that brings teams together to complete a goal within an immersive setting. Whether seeking a sunken treasure, solving a murder, or stealing the contents of a secure bank vault, your team will encounter obstacles and challenges that will require deduction, communication and collaboration to emerge triumphant before your 60 minutes are up.
At Enigma Quests, you don’t just play an escape room; you step into an adventure! Our operatives are sent across the multiverse on crucial missions, entering worlds of magic, time travel, and heisting.
Explore our acclaimed escape rooms
What to Expect From an Escape Room
Growing out of online “Escape the room” games, escape rooms have evolved into a thrilling immersive activity, with thousands of rooms across the globe, including many in our home city of London. Escape rooms place your team within a detailed room (whether that’s an underground laboratory, a Victorian manor, or a magical school), with 60 minutes on the clock to solve a series of interconnected puzzles and complete the story.
Combining varied, ingenious puzzles, a beautifully detailed location, and a compelling narrative, the best Escape Rooms are truly transformative experiences, perfect for families, friends, and colleagues. Escape rooms are built completely around teamwork, whether playing as a couple or as a larger group. As escape room venues will typically have quite limited slots, it’s crucial to book in advance!
How Do Escape Rooms Work?
Escape rooms typically start as a single room, and open up into further areas as you progress through the puzzles. Your team will receive an in-character introduction from your host (or EQ Handler, as we call them), who’ll explain the rules of the room and the goal you’ll need to complete before your time runs out. Your EQ Handler will accompany you over a radio throughout the game, there to help you if you get stuck, and to ensure teams of all skill levels have a great time.
The opening area of an escape room will typically feature a range of initial puzzles and clues. From pattern recognition to deduction to tests of skill, there will be a huge range of challenges, giving all players a chance to shine. While this will vary based on the escape room, typically, further areas will open up for your team upon completing a specific puzzle. There will be a time limit for completion, usually 60 minutes, which helps to keep up the pressure. Some escape rooms will end with your team having to make a final declaration, such as choosing who to accuse of murder, while others will simply end with a final puzzle.
Once finished, you’ll get to debrief with your EQ Handler, who’ll talk you through your performance in the room and how much time you had left.
What Team Sizes are Best for Escape Rooms?
At Enigma Quests, we allow for units of 2-5 players to take on our escape rooms (we allow for 6 on request, but don’t advise it). The more players, the more puzzles you’ll be able to tackle simultaneously, generally making things easier. However, more people can also mean more confusion and miscommunication. A really strong two-person team can often do fantastically well.
Escape Room Tips
While escape rooms offer a fantastic experience for all players, including newcomers, there are a few quick tips to keep in mind to have the best possible experience.
- Start by exploring: While your team may want to jump right in, we’d always recommend taking a minute or two to familiarise yourself with the available elements. From clues to locked doors, to strange elements in the room, work together to understand the different puzzles awaiting you before you start solving them.
- Everything is intentional: From the underlined words in a letter to the unusual patterns in a work of art, if something jumps out at you in the room, there’s probably a reason for it!
- Communicate: With larger groups, it’s crucial to keep each other informed of your progress. After all, the items you find may be crucial for solving a puzzle another team member is stuck on.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help: Your EQ Handler is there to help you if you’re truly stuck. Don’t be afraid to ask them for a nudge in the right direction.
Our Incredible Escape Rooms
While Enigma Quests Holborn may appear to be a humble entertainment venue to the outside world, when you step through our doors, you will, in fact, be entering a clandestine world of intergalactic adventures. The secret is out, our escape rooms are far from pretend! Our operatives travel the multiverse righting wrongs, fighting evil, and generally preserving the balance. We offer 3 brilliant missions available to book now.
- Inventor’s Odyssey Through Time: Your unit is sent into the laboratory of a famous inventor. Your mission: To stop the secret of time travel from falling into the wrong hands. To do this, you’ll need to journey back and forth in time, all within the same ever-changing laboratory, and with just 60 minutes on the clock.
- The Billion Pound Heist: Break into the safehouse of London’s most notorious criminal gang, analyse highly confidential intel, and crack the tough security systems before encountering the vault. Starting within a high-end art gallery, this mission will take your unit into the perilous depths of London, with stakes that couldn’t be higher. Should you make it, remember your mission, and don’t let yourself get distracted by the fathomless riches!
- World of Witchcraft and Wizardry: Step into a world of magic in this incredible room, where your unit of witches and wizards will need to solve a supernatural disappearance. Across your adventure, you’ll have to harness the power of magic and the strength of all your deductive capabilities to succeed.
Our Holborn venue has everything you need for a full day out, with an on-site bar, Beyond the Web, and our pizzeria, The Comet Club. And for something a little different to a standard escape room, why not brave the Escape Arcade?
FAQs
Can you get locked in an escape room?
You are never going to be physically trapped within an escape room. This means that if you need to leave at any time during the game, you’re always welcome to step out! Be warned, your timer will not be paused if you leave the room.
What happens if I can’t complete an escape room?
The thrill of an escape room comes from the very real stakes – fail to complete the final puzzle (or give the incorrect answer at the final stage), and you will fail!
However, our goal (and the goal of the many other brilliant escape room companies around the world) is to give our players a fantastic time. Our EQ Handlers are there to help point teams in the right direction and ensure they get the most out of their session. On the opposite side, many hardened escape room fans will opt to play the game entirely without tips, for the ultimate challenge.
Will I enjoy an escape room?
Escape rooms are a thrilling, immersive team activity. While they have some connections to things like video games, they can be easily enjoyed by someone who has never played one before. We’ve seen first-hand how they’ve engaged players of all ages and experience levels (though we wouldn’t recommend them for children younger than 9). If the idea of an escape room appeals to you, you’ll probably enjoy it!
What should I wear to an escape room?
Something comfortable! You’ll be on your feet for an hour, so dress appropriately. Sometimes players choose to dress up as characters from the rooms, but it’s not an obligation!
