Houdini's Escape Room Experience - Birmingham — Attraction in Birmingham

We were really disappointed with our recent trip to play the newest game at Star City - Sneaky Finders. We’ve played Houdini's rooms before and have always found them to be really good. This one, however, fell far short of the standard we’ve come to expect. We have played over 100 rooms in total and this one is by far one of the worst rooms we've ever played!

The theming and general look of the game is excellent, but that was as good as it got. During the game, we encountered multiple faults, including magnetic locks not opening and a laser pointer not functioning. As a result, this completely spoiled the experience and it was impossible to play the game in full. At one point, when a door wouldn't open, the games host had to come into the room (everyone's pet peeve) and escort us through the back corridors of Star City into another part of the game!

The lacklustre staff employed at the venue also did not help with the situation, repeating clues to us when there was clearly an issue with the maintenance of the room rather than our comprehension. We appreciate that sometimes rooms just break – nothing can be done about this, but the experience doesn’t have to be totally ruined. In this instance the games host showed no remorse for our terrible experience and gave us a generic Star City email address for our complaint (we are still waiting to hear back). The icing on the cake was the auto-generated 'you almost made it out' email we received afterwards...

We have been totally put off by this experience and will not be visiting a Houdini's again. Definitely wouldn't recommend the Star City...

I am very disappointed with my experience at Houdini Star City yesterday. I have completed several escape rooms in the past at Escape Hunt and had pleasant experiences every time. I booked the Titanic room for 4 people which shows a 3/5 difficulty on the website. The room would have been absolutely impossible to complete without any hints being given by the host. On top of that, almost all of the tasks were to find keys instead of actual games which I felt was very monotonous. Many of the tasks were to find combinations to padlocks. We observed a padlock on the ceiling which was identical to the other padlocks used in the game so we assumed it was part of it. There was a moveable chair one metre away from this spot so we moved the chair in order to reach the padlock. The host was well aware of what we were doing and could hear what we were doing also. After a couple minutes of trying to open the padlock on the ceiling, the host says, “if you do that again i will have to ask you to leave.” we were completely shocked as no warning was given prior to this nor did we intend to cause any harm (of which we of course didn’t.) After this, I lost all of the little motivation I had left to complete the room as I felt the host (who i won’t name publicly) could have been a lot more polite about this. All he had to say was “That padlock is not part of the game.” I am quite upset as the room cost £100 total and I did not feel like this was worth it at all. I don’t think I will...

When booking the escape room for two people I choose the date I wanted and it showed me the price and I went ahead and booked. When it confirmed the booking I noticed it took double payment when looking into it I realised it had booked the escape room for the day I want it and the day after I booked it. I went straight down to star city to speak to them around 7pm but it was closed although it says open till 10pm. I went down the next day when it says it’s open at 10am and I had to wait until about 1:30 and keep ringing the doorbell and phone so I could speak to someone in person. I was told my refund will take a couple of weeks. I requested to cancel both bookings as I wasn’t happy. They did. I then received no update regarding my refund. It has now been two weeks since the bookings were made and I’ve only received one booking refund after chasing them up almost every day. Still waiting for half my refund. Not happy and will be calling again and again till...