Escape Stockport Ltd — Local services in Stockport

My daughter and I did the Pirates Cove escape room, at Escape Stockport last week. This was the first hour long escape room my daughter had done, and the first escape room we'd done at this venue. My daughter enjoyed it a lot and is really looking forward to trying the Tea Party of Madness one.

I've done a few escape rooms in different venues, and this one I found a little unusual. It was a single room, mostly a linear to complete, and each time we completed one puzzle, we had to let the staff know and hand them the locks and keys, so they could give us some equipment we needed for the next puzzle. I'm not sure why the equipment wasn't just in the room so that we could do puzzles in whichever order we liked, and the keys could have been used in some way to enable us to access the final piece of the puzzle. I wonder if they've had items lost/stolen in the past. It felt a little less immersive and took up time waiting for the staff to come to the room.

There were different puzzle types, and different lock types, which was good. As some other people have said, the laminated information sheets need replacing with new versions. The printed information for the first puzzle seemed to have been printed in large from a low resolution image, resulting in pixelation and making it hard to read. The information scroll for one puzzle was very hard to read in parts due to the laminated sheet being rolled and unrolled with each use, and damaging it. The small piece of paper for another puzzle was also hard to read with all of the information being crammed into a small space.

We had intended that my daughter would do all of the puzzles herself, with just a little help from me. If a piece of paper and pencil had been provided, I could have copied down the info from several of the puzzles for her to work out. As it was, many of the puzzles had to be worked out in our heads, meaning that it was me doing the work rather than enabling my daughter.

A countdown timer on a screen, or even just a manual countdown clock should have been available in the room, so we could see how much time we had left. That would have also helped me work out how much time I could give my daughter to work out puzzles, and how much help to offer her.

The scenery was good, and the staff were lovely. Overall we had a lovely time and escaped with over half an...

I have been to roughly 20-25 escape rooms over the last few years and experienced many different takes on the escape room. Some have been more basic than others, however, all have been well thought out, enjoyable and clearly designed by someone with a passion for escape games. Unfortunately, this was not the case in this instance. We played the chemistry lab.

It began badly with a brief from one of the staff. He had unfortunately not learned the spiel well enough and this led to a disjointed delivery that had very little atmosphere.

We were then led to a very basic room and set to work. The room itself had no form of camera or timing equipment meaning that every 15 minutes the host through the opening (no door) came to announce the time which damaged the immersion.

The room only had about 5 puzzles and was both poorly cued and riddled with so many red herrings that it was impossible to get your bearings. The first puzzle required trawling through a huge amount of text before coming to any guidance to help with solving. Following that we managed to skip 2 out of 5 puzzles to complete the game having unlocked only 3 puzzles. It was disappointing that this was even possible and left us feeling rather deflated.

Additionally, whilst I accept that some escape rooms focus more on the puzzles than the room dressing and that companies have a wide range of budgets, the room was somewhat thrown together (including a gaping hole in the final door around the code lock) and didn't feel like it had been particularly well cleaned, which was a concern given the pandemic.

All in all it was a disappointing experience and I would say the only escape room that I have ever considered leaving without finishing. I hope that this reflects a period of disuse following lockdown and the rooms and puzzles are revamped in the coming months as it was a lot of money to pay for such a poor quality experience. Not one I would...

Absolutely shocking. They added a live actor to be chained up with a member of our group without asking our permission or telling us that this would be the case. They live actor was in the room for the entire hour with us and it completely took the fun out of the experience. It was incredibly uncomfortable having them their, and had we known that they would be there, we would have booked it. The room was incredibly basic and completely unclean. It's clearly not kept in good condition. The tape within the room didn't work, and it took over 15 minutes to get the tape working, which lost us important time. It seems that the owner/designer of the room has desperately tried to make the room intellectually challenging, but by doing this has made it long winded and boring. The worst escape room I have ever visited, and I would not recommend it to anyone. The owner had no charisma and the storyline was vague and uninteresting. We're lucky to have even found the entrance as then "flyers" that advertise the room, are actually 4x3cm stickers on the window of another shop. A terrible experience and not even worth the less than half price offer we managed to get. Do not visit this room, pay extra and go elsewhere as you are guaranteed to...