LOK'd! Room Escape — Attraction in Manchester

I did one of the escape rooms here and it felt like it was made by 2 people. One person who made a decent room, and then the 2nd person just added one convoluted extra bit onto each puzzle. One puzzle involved doing some math based on some context that made sense, and then we didn't see this printed label hidden under the lip of something that said "subtract XXX". It would have just simply flowed better and fit the theme more if it just ended before the random hidden label was needed. Its not like it added anything to the puzzle other than frustration.

There was multiple puzzles involved knowledge of songs or other things that you are just supposed to know before entering the room as there is no clues otherwise to these puzzles. We asked the staff member at the end how we were supposed to solve these puzzles without the outside knowledge, and they said "ask for more hints". The puzzle that involved the music was great until they added some extra convoluted twist ontop of it that was 100% not needed and required outside knowledge.

It would have been nice to find more hidden puzzles and boxes that needed to be solved, but right off the bat you are given a shelf with basically every box you need to open all at once. There was multiple locks that required 4 or 5 numbers to be solved so we would kind of have to guess at times which box the code was for. Usually places try to avoid multiple locks of the same type from being present at the same time.

Also there was only one person that was working there at the time as far as I was aware, so there was times when we would need a hint and the person who was supposed to give us clues was at the front desk or something helping someone, and we just had to keep asking for clues until they got back to watching us... while the clock is still counting down.

The staff was friendly and did everything they can being just 1 person, but the escape room...

So me and my family were doing stranded and the person we had was Gwen. She never showed us how the locks worked and she never paid attention to us when we needed help. We got stuck on an lock over over ten minutes because we couldn’t figure out how to restart it, because she never showed us! Then when she came in she couldn’t do it either and we said a lot of times that we needed help on how to restart it and she never did until the 10 minutes past. She was very rude with it and gave my cousin lots of attitude. It made the experience not so good. Also when we had 5 minutes left we were asking for help and she never helped us because she left and never told the new person where we were and that really sucked. Gwen was rude and unpleasant and I definitely won’t come back if...

So my kids and I did 2 escape rooms. The first one was called stranded and if I had only done that one I would of rated it as a 4. Having a good game master can make or break the experience and the first one was great. (Thanks Lori) Puzzles were challenging but fun, and when we needed help they were fairly quick to respond. The second one we did was the agency. Over all I would of rated that as a 2. My rating here is the average. For the agency the puzzles did not seem to make sense to me which was fine except we probably wasted almost 10 of the 60 minutes begging for help and waiting for hints. I wanted to enjoy it as I had the first but I just didn't. For me personally I would not return as it didn't feel worth it at the end of the...