Lock and Code Escape Rooms Taunton — Local services in Great Britain

Having seen all the 5 star reviews we were excited to try out the escape room, murder on the menu. We arrived early following a team that had only just finished our room, the game master did everything she could to reset the room as quickly as possible even though we were very happy to wait. No fault on her she was great with the tools that were given to her. Unfortunately the room was very tired, doors on terrible latches that hardly worked, things like so may pieces of paper that could have so easily been printed off again looking tired, worn and some drawing all over. It was a multiple room escape room with most of them having something that didn’t work, one room had huge contraption with a paper that was supposed to fall out, didn’t work so the GM just said go back to the main room as it would be there. Same for the another room, a safe wouldn’t open with a magnetic thing so she just gave up and said come though to the main room again. Very much ruined the atmosphere and just a bit eye roll worthy. Not to mention the last part of the room was easily broken through by some boxes, not the lock and key door that would’ve been much better. I had picked up the cardboard boxes and immediately been told to put them down as we would’ve escaped then and there. Considering we just paid £65 to go to this escape room you would’ve thought some money could be spent on the rooms themselves. I should have said this as we left to get some sort of money back but again I felt so bad for the GM we just left disappointed. Would not recommend unfortunately.

Update: Having spoken to Lock and Code escape room we tried to convey what our experience was but got misrepresented at every turn. I'm glad you have laminated the paper but that wasn't the only issue, we were disappointed as other escape rooms we have done were finished to a much higher standard and as we have said we were eye rolling by the end as there we so many things not working! I feel we made it very clear what the issues were within the game and you kept dulling them down. You also said you would contact us for a refund but we since haven't heard from you. We contacted you out of good faith and I left the phone conversation feeling like you hadn't taken anything we said on board, I do appreciate that you offered us a chance to play another game but unfortunately we do not live locally. You cannot offer a refund and not follow through and then reply to a review with events that didn't happen, just a bit disappointed as we have been misrepresented. I wouldn't have responded to this review had I not seen what you had updated it as. I hope you take what we said on board.

Update number two - I think you only have to look at the reply to see what kind of response we got. I have never been contacted, I feel our review was very kind and we were very kind on the phone, there has been no contact since and of course it will be our word against yours, although I’m unsure why we would lie? I have nothing against you as people, I just left an honest review about your escape room. You only have to look at the other lower reviews to see we were all in the same ball park. Not very professional at all, though as I have said in the previous reviews we only hoped you took our feedback on board, but clearly you had to be very defensive, even to slate your game master, and say that we didn’t understand or were too heavy handed which absolutely was not the case. As I say, our word against yours, I’ll get the other two people who completed the room with me to leave their honest reviews. Again, HORRIBLY unprofessional, would not recommend, a refund that was promised would be appreciated rather than lies and a passive aggressive response to my review. If I see another response I’ll ring for my refund and maybe rather than being SO unprofessional, like you were on the phone call, and replying to my reviews here, you can contact...

Room: Breakout! - This might have been an OK room once, but nowadays it's just bad in a lot of ways. It might just have a place in our top 10 of worst rooms we ever played (out of over 300). The room falls apart, the wall decorations come off, the ceiling and the walls have holes, and a locker that used to be attached to a wall is completly lose and can be accessed from the side - letting you bypass a lock completly if you wanted (we had to ask the GM if this bypass was part of the game or not; and it was not). Most of these things are easily fixable, but somebody would need to care enough to do some minor repairs that would maybe take a day. But apparently this company has no issues with charching full price for a broken product. Apart from the appearance and problems arising from bad maintenance, the room wasn't reset correctly, and we find hidden clues in the wrong order. We ended up getting stuff at a point where we did no longer need it, which completly confused us and broke our flow. Also, most riddles were basic to a point where they can hardly be considered riddles, it's more about just trying the most straightforward things. The GM was friendly, but kept giving us clues and hints through the walkie talkie even though we specifically told him that we would want to ask for them actively. This was extremly frustrating since most of these little clues or questions were not necessary at all since we were already working on stuff or had these things in the back of our mind to come back to later. The icing on the cake was the last riddle, which had a technical failure, so we have no idea if we even solved it since the GM at some point just came in and told us we got out. We were not offered any sort of (partial) refund even though there were major issues. To be fair, we did also not ask for it, but with the amount of issues we had I would expect this from a...

This was comfortably the poorest escape room any of my group had experienced (some having done dozens). We did two rooms between us - Breakout and Homecoming. In Homecoming, we asked for no clues at all unless we asked (which was largely honoured). After 15 minutes we had made zero progress and resorted to asking for a clue, only to discover that one of the padlocks had been mis-set. This should have been obvious to the game observer as we had tried that padlock with the correct code (essentially, the only available clue) several times.

The rest of the room was error-free but the puzzles were mostly of low quality. The light in the room was terrible - presumably for "atmosphere", but it was just a major hindrance to reading anything and detracted significantly. Lots of room fittings and game apparatus were in a state of disrepair or broken and several of the puzzles could be (and were) accidentally short cut.

We exited, assuming that the other group would have had a better time. In fact, they had found no fewer than three major errors with their room's setup, which had completely ruined their game. For context, one of the team had done about 40 escape rooms previously and had only ever seen one setup error.

The organisers did apologise but there were a number of excuses made (for example, about the padlocks being easy to mis-set) when the problems were all avoidable; some were a result of delapidation or poor design but the major issues were due to human error.

The organisers have offered our organiser a free play at another room, which is something, but there are clearly major problems with the way this venue is run. The number of 5-star reviews is baffling; perhaps significant staff turnover is partly responsible for the issues we faced but our game room was badly in need of some TLC and the inherent puzzle quality was...