#AD Escape Rooms Cardiff | The One That Defeated Us
I was gifted our escape room experience for free in exchange for a blog review but all opinions are very much my own.
It sounds like a bad episode of Friends doesn’t it?
Spoiler alert - as the title might suggest, we didn’t make it out of this one. No, I’m not writing this from the Escape Rooms, we were let out but we didn’t escape within the time frame.
My escape rooms partners are always my Dad, my brother and my sister in law and we have been lucky enough to be gifted an experience at Escape Rooms Cardiff before (which you can read here). This time around we were there to try out the zombie room, part of the renovations they’ve had at the venue.
As well as the rooms upstairs that have been there for a while now, Escape Rooms Cardiff also boasts some basement rooms and a swanky new reception and waiting area. The introduction to the rooms is the slickest set up of any escape rooms I have been to with a cinema esque area with a short animation to show you the rules of the game. The film is shown to a few groups at a time if you’re booked in for different rooms in the same hour slots which frees up the staff and makes the whole experience a well oiled machine.
We went for ‘Z’, a zombie apocalypse themed room in the basement which freaked us out before we’d even got in there. The ‘storyline’ of the room is that you have found the safe house of a zombie hunter who has left his bunker. You have access to his medical supplies and armoury and you have 60 minutes to get the power back on and the bunker’s defence systems back up before the zombies inevitably break in and you are zombie food.
Obviously the premise of the escape rooms relies on people keeping the secrets a la the Harry Potter play so I won’t be going into detail on the clues or how we did but safe to say we took a while to get into it. We wasted the first 10 minutes getting our heads back in the game and had absolutely no idea where to start; until I worked it out and it was the easiest clue ever. Because of the time wasted we could’ve done with the extra time at the end when the most difficult clues reared their heads and thus, we didn’t keep up our winning streak of breaking out of all the rooms we’d been in.
We really enjoyed the storyline behind this room, the clues were some of the most infuriating and difficult we’ve tried for a long time but the story was fab. The lights kept going out, the music set up the theme perfectly and at one point I was sure me and my sister in law were going to break out of the room from sheer fear.
In the end my brother and sister in law were working out the last clue and I was counting down 10, 9, 8 and so on and so forth before the clock hit red and we had failed. The staff told us we had maybe a minute or so left in us before we would have cracked the code to get out because we were busy working it out but there we were, our 10 minutes pissing about at the beginning had come back to haunt us.
Overall, another Friday night well spent (and we’re basically taking it as a win…..) I love reviewing escape rooms because we genuinely spend our cold hard cash on them as presents to each other and I recommend them all the time to friends so it’s a joy to be able to treat my family to a freebie one every once in a while.
Our huge thanks to the staff at Escape Rooms Cardiff as always who make it a fun filled evening - zombies included or otherwise!
