Houdini's Escape Room Experience - Gloucester — Local services in Gloucester

Did the Hexmore escape room & felt it left a lot to be desired. Have done about 7-8 escape rooms in the past ranging from mid to challenging & this one was the first I've experienced that was just plain unintuitive. The puzzles mainly revolve around waggling a wand around and repeating a spell 3x in unison with your group, and sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't. You had no idea whether it was because you weren't in sync with your teammates, or one of you was waving their wand in the wrong direction, or mispronouncing a spell. Was it because someone was watching us and pushing the button to release a lock if we did it correctly, or are there accelerometers in the wands that can sense movement? If the former, what if the game operator wasn't looking or paying attention?

The first half hour was spent in utter confusion, with 6 people pointing wands at different objects and rattling through all the given spells. For example, you have an unlock spell, and there are multiple items in the rooms which are electronically locked. So you point wands at one locked item and all chant whatever to unlock it, and it works! Then you point at other objects and it doesn't work.. Ok, so maybe one of your timing was off, so you try it again and it still doesn't work.

That's the core problem - the lack of feedback. Does this thing I'm doing give me a result or not? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes who knows?

-Room spoilers ahead- The coup-de-grace of the whole experience was hearing a rhythmic beating sound coming through some pretty poor quality speakers. We couldn't decide whether the speakers were broken or not because the host's voice was so quiet anyway, but it was just like.. tap-tap... tap-tap... tap-tap. There was a spell to calm nerves and the room made reference to facing a challenge when you're calm and ready, so we were trying to use calm nerves spell on ourselves, on each other, on random things in the room. Red herring, because it was actually supposed to be the galloping of hooves.. it just genuinely sounded like someone tapping their fingers on a table. Absolutely nothing like hooves. The girls in our group spend their lives around horses. Didn't sound anything like horses.

So being frankly honest, every escape room I've done has been at least 4/5, but this one was just bad. Two members of the party have never done an escape room before and they said they wouldn't go to another based on that experience, my wife & I agreed it was very poor. Some of the puzzles were cool, the riddle you have to solve was fun to think about with the group, but the real limiting factor is definitely the wands and how vague the feedback is, it could be really helped out with a sound effect for doing something correctly (albeit at the wrong object) and fix that speaker because that lost us a significant amount of time. Needing to say the name of the candle too was just not intuitive at all, we're all pointing wands at the right candle, saying the right spell, but nothing happens, and that's again the problem of having no feedback. Because you know you want to extinguish the candle, you point your wands at the candle, you say the spell to extinguish it, nothing happens so you rule it out and move on.

In the end, we all left feeling frustrated, the host sensed it too, I don't think any of us will be back. Cyber Q in Worcester offers a much...

My friend and I were so looking forward to the “Escape from Alcatraz” experience in Gloucester on 7thSeptember (her birthday gift from me) that we got there well in advance of the recommended 15 minutes – 45 minutes to be precise.

We checked in at the front desk and purchased drinks while we waited and were told someone would be with us shortly.

We noticed a girl go past us to the desk and continued to wait but no-one came to see us at all.

We waited and waited and eventually, at the time of our experience, I went to the desk to see what was happening. Apparently, there was an issue with the booking but no-one had told us and had just kept us sitting there for 45 minutes. I asked why they didn’t tell us and pointed out that just ignoring people was unacceptable but the girl from Houdini’s just didn’t seem to want to know. It transpires that Tenpin and Houdini’s operate separately so they couldn’t help. They understood my frustrations and apologised but there weas nothing they could do. That was more than I got from the Houdini representative.

She was not polite or helpful and had no interest in trying to help. Apparently, nothing she can do and can’t even speak to Houdini’s to try to resolve. One phone call later and low and behold things can get sorted (I did state my displeasure at this point) although it was 2 hours later than we’d anticipated our experience to be they found a solution.

Ensuring we again arrived within the required 15 minutes prior we checked in and made sure the girl from Houdini’s was told we were there. So again, we sat and waited and watched the girl from Houdini’s walk straight past us to the desk. That’s ok I thought, she needed to check our details.

10 minutes later a member of Tenpin staff came over to say we could book in so we dutifully stood at the desk and waited … and waited … and waited. Another 10 minutes and I call out to the girl from Houdini’s and ask if she’s going to serve us anytime soon. She looks over her shoulder and asks what we’re there for. When I told her the 1pm experience I was advised that I was not stood at her booking station and turned back around (ARE YOU KIDDING ME?)

I will point out now that the booking desk is an L shape with the long side being Tenpin and the other being Houdinis – not that this is marked, or were we told at any point that there was a specific place. How foolish of us to stand in the wrong place?

Why, when she knows people are waiting for an experience they’ve paid for, and they turn out to be the same people who have already had an issue earlier that day, would you resolutely stand with your back to them and not acknowledge them at all? RUDE!!!

That’s alright, don’t you worry, we’ll walk round to you!!!!!!!

Booking was a painful experience due to the complete lack of interest/customer service.

SO, after such disappointing service/support I thank you for giving me a review card and I am happy to say ELLIE, never before have I received such poor service and been treated so badly. You were beyond rude and runed what should have been a fun birthday experience between 2 friends. Even the staff at Tenpin seemed surprised by your behaviour and attitude. Houdini’s, you should be appalled that this is how you are represented and hope that my experience falls way, way short of your expectation on how customers...

An interesting experience. As we were leaving to attend our booking we were called and told that due to staff shortages we would have to change our slot. Luckily this wasn't too much of an inconvenience for us and we appreciated the notice but it did seem little bit last minute.

My partner and I went for the Hexmore room. It was the first one we'd done in a while and we were really looking forward to it based on reviews on trip advisor etc. Sadly, we both left feeling a little dissapointed.

We chose that room in particular as it was supposed to be the easiest of the three on offer according to the website. However, upon arrival our host told us that it in fact wasn't the easiest.

The room was very dark, and while atmosphere plays a big part of the room it shouldn't be at the expense of the overall experience. We were given one very small and frankly hopeless torch and told to use our phone torches.

The host did a fairly good job of explaining how the room worked however some miscommunication lead to us scratching our heads for the first 15 minutes just trying to find the first puzzle. There was a black board in the room and our host mentioned we should not shine torches at it and just talk into it and ask for help if we needed it. Naturally we disregarded it as a clue and just saw it as way to communicate with the host didn't associate it to being a puzzle. After a while the host came back in and told us we should've been waving our wands at the black board. Maybe this was us being thick and I don't believe the host was being intentionally misleading but it threw us off immediately.

One reason why we spent so long trying to figure it out is because of the huge amount of redherrings you are presented with from the very beginning. The room is full of papers that as far as we could tell aren't required until much later and even then it's only a couple of pages.

We felt that the puzzles were disjointed and didn't flow naturally, also clues for one puzzle would be referring to something in another room with the answer being in another room again. It just seemed like we spent a lot of time figuring out what we needed to do next instead of spending time solving puzzles.

There are several do not touch signs around the room and while these can be useful the phrase "do not touch" apparently doesn't mean "this isn't part of a puzzle". This may seem obvious but for someone who as done a few escape rooms before I think it's fair to assume one means the other.

The wands seemed like a good idea but for us kind of fell flat. A couple of times the spells didn't seem to do anything and the host had to come in and hand us something that "was supposed to be revealed" so the engagement in the room was lost.

Ultimately, we didn't make it out of the room. Which is fine but upon voicing our take on the room to our host we were told. "Go to Bristol if you want something easier". Felt a bit rude.

It's unlikely that we...