On our recent visit to Cambridge, Cambridge Escape Rooms, very kindly invited us to check out their new Heaven and Hell (intermediate) experience. They are ranking #11 out of 187 things to do in Cambridge on Tripadvisor, just below University of Cambridge (#10) and River Cam (#9) and above King’s College (#15) and The Backs (the famous backyards of the colleges, next to the River Cam, #16). Needless to say that they hold a Certificate of Excellence.
Ms B and I were joined by two friends from London, one of whom had done two dozen rooms and – despite the fact that she’s not giving away compliments easily – told us afterwards, that this was by far the best room she had ever done.
The premises are a 10-minute cab ride from the city centre. We were greeted immediately by Sam, one of the friendly staff, who explained the plot. You are finding yourself in a mortuary, dead, and you need to find a defibrillator to return to the living. The defibrillator will only work for one hour and you know you’re going to stay in hell if you can’t find and successfully operate it within the hour.
For one hour we were solving riddle after riddle. Nothing is what it seems. Everything is interconnected.
All photos up to and including ‘Bomb’ (c) Cambridge Escape Rooms. Rest royalty-free third-party pictures.
To be frank, I’m not that smart, so I let Ms B and our friends do most of the heavy-lifting and just tried not to disturb them. In many cases they weren’t able to explain how they’d solved the respective riddle, it just happened intuitively, somehow their brains just drew a conclusion from what presented itself in front of their eyes. I got goose pimples a couple of times, because it’s so weird and wonderful to watch the magic happen.
The puzzles you have to solve are incredibly sophisticated and the show these good folks put on is amazing. Ms B was scared off her head on more than one occasion, in a good way, and I can certainly attest to having had a great time.
Wish I could tell you more, but that would be giving it all away, so can’t do it. We escaped with just 50 seconds to go! Close call.
We’ll be back as paying customers during one of our next visits to town. Great fun!
Looking for more things to do in and around Cambridge? Check out our posts about skydiving and my jetlev ride. Other fun activities a bit further away are covered in our posts about rides on a very fast rubber boat, a helicopter, and on a jetski.
6 Comments
As one of the aforementioned friends, I can confirm that this is probably the best escape room I’ve done so far. The production values are fantastic with a lot of thought and effort that other venues lack despite my enjoying those games too. Most other venues stick you in bare rooms with props in but the Cambridge venue differs as it 1) decorated each room to completely immerse you in the experience and 2) had more interesting ways of progressing you through the game which I can’t describe without giving the game away. I’d love to go back and try their other rooms. Also I loved the keyring souvenir; a touch which other rooms don’t provide either. Big thanks to Sam who was really lovely.
Hey, aforementioned friend, thanks for the comment! We’ll have to check out the other Cambridge Escape Rooms I guess. Can’t believe ours was medium difficulty, it felt like my mind was going up in multiple explosions on a constant basis.. By the way, that other escape room thingy is now confirmed to take place in early December, we’ll just need to fix a date and time (a week ahead of the visit or so). 🙂
PS: I’m starting to think: shall we aim to visit Budapest, the world capital of escape rooms, at some stage? I know Ms B would be in.
December sounds good, thanks for the invite. Budapest: you’re a mind reader as I was thinking yesterday about visiting!
We love this town. Pity we didn’t know about the escape rooms back then. Ruin pubs, Parliament, Fisherman’s Bastion, Szechenyi Spa, and all the great restaurants were definitely already worth it, though. Thanks for all the comments. 🙂