The Escape Key, Newcastle - Solve the Escape Rooms and Save the World!

Late to the party as always, before my visit to the Escape Key in Newcastle I had never visited an escape room. Despite Simon raving about his experience when he did one on his stag do and hearing great reports from friends, I've never really fancied it. You see, solving clues and puzzles really isn't my strong point.

So Chloe v The Escape Room was always going to be interesting!

Not being completely daft I made sure I pulled together a team of people who are far more skilled than me: Simon (the King of Puzzle Solving), Katie (who can chat her way out of any situation) and Alan, (Super Dad - he built his kids a YouTube studio don't you know!)

Escape Key is Newcastle's newest escape room and I'm pretty sure it's the best! Using a great combination of local history and modern technology their games are fully immersive, make you use a huge variety of skills and create an authentic world that you can truly escape into (and then hopefully out of!). There are currently two games to choose from, The Plague Room (overlooking Newcastle's real life plague pit .. creepy) or the game that we played, Armageddon.

After a warm welcome by our Games Master we settled down to watch a short film to get us ready for the evening ahead. The film was suddenly interrupted by an urgent news broadcast, a huge meteor spanning 20 miles was hurtling towards earth and so far every attempt to avert it had been thwarted. Doing all that they can, the UK Government had reopened an old nuclear bunker in the North East of England and were about to send in a team of experts to crack the bunker's codes and launch a missile to prevent Armageddon.

We suddenly realised that we were the team of experts!

With the fate of the world in our hands we made our way into the bunker, with an urgent realisation that we had only been given an hour to save the world.

Welcome to Armageddon!

As soon as we were let into the room the clock started and it was amazing how for the first few minutes we stood around feeling a bit confused and overwhelmed. How did we know where to begin? With so much to look at and rummage through we knew we had to look for something but we weren't exactly sure what?

Luckily Simon put his years of gaming experience to use (he's always telling me that shutting himself away for hours playing games is a great idea!) and immediately set to work finding clues and unlocking padlocks and it wasn't long before we all began to pick up the general idea of how to solve the room's mysteries and puzzles.

When we got completely stuck there was a little bell in the corner that we could ring for a little guidance from our games master, and every now and again his voice boomed out in the room offering us little clues to help out.

I'd been worried before going in that I wasn't going to be a great asset to the team but I soon realised that everyone had a role to play. Our challenges weren't just mental, there were also some physical and observational challenges and, my personal favourite, there was always someone needed to hold the torch!

Before we knew it we had managed to unlock the room but there was no time for celebrations as we opened the door to reveal another room and this one was full of very complicated looking computer equipment and, most alarmingly, a huge clock telling us how long we had left!

PANIC!

We had to use all of the clues we had gathered to solve a set of puzzles to start up the missile launcher, not an easy task when you have a big clock counting down in front of you.

There was a lot of frantic dashing around the room, some very expert torch holding (if I do say so myself), and an uber competitive Simon who wanted to solve everything at once! If ever there's the threat of Armageddon let me tell you, he's your man!

After what felt like forever we eventually managed to launch the missile and complete our mission. Whilst we were racing around the room there were moments I thought we'd never do it so it was amazing to escape the room in 42 minutes and 32 seconds, not bad at all and apparently not too far off the record!

I loved my first ever Escape Room experience and if you're looking for something really great to do in Newcastle then I highly recommend getting yourself to The Escape Key. Rooms cost from £45.00 to play depending on how many people you have in your team. To find out more about prices click here.

Find The Escape Key at:

60-62 St Andrew's Street
NE1 5SF

0191 468 2068

https://www.escape-key.co.uk/

We were invited to enjoy a complimentary game at The Escape Key in exchange for an honest review.  All thoughts are my own.