As you may have noticed, October was a busy month for all 3 of our Breakout sites. We opened a new room in each city we are based in. We opened The Heist in Liverpool, Manchester opened Captured and Cardiff opened Disturbed.

The Heist is the 7^th room to come to Liverpool and throws you into a scenario in which you are a team of elite bank robbers in the midst of your most daring heist ever. You have reached the legendary vault of the Locke and Quay Treasury - rumoured to house the fabled private depository of one of their richest clients. You have 60 minutes to raid the vault and make your escape before the back up security systems seal your fate forever.

The process of opening a new room is very exciting for us and we love working towards bringing you guys the best possible rooms to play in! The process always begins when a property is purchased, we take a look at the layout of the building and work out how many rooms we can fit in there so that we know for future reference. Once we’ve moved into the property, we can then start opening new rooms on a regular basis. This is important to us as we like bringing you new and exhilarating rooms you can immerse yourself into and it keeps us fresh and reminds us that we’re always able to learn.

Once we’re ready to open a new room, we start the process with an empty slate, and collect ideas around all members of staff on what the theme of the room should be. This is important as it’s great to hear everyone’s ideas, and it also helps create even newer ideas by bouncing different concepts off each other. Once everyone has had their say on the new room, a team is then put together to solely focus on creating the room. The team then get together to decide on a vague storyline for the room to give everyone a basic idea on how the puzzles should link with the storyline, and how the decoration of the room should look. A project manager is chosen who works with each individual member of the team to help ensure that all deadlines are met and that all areas of the room are as good as they can be. Next, our puzzle master works on creating the most important part of our rooms – THE PUZZLES! The puzzle masters job is to (yes, you guessed it!) create all puzzles which will go into the room for you guys to sink your teeth into. This task involves a lot of pressure, as you can imagine, just think of an escape room in which the puzzles aren’t great, but our puzzle master always pulls through for us which is why you love our rooms so much!

Once the Puzzle Master has formed an idea of the game play, it’s time for the game development team to make everything hit the theme. These guys make our rooms look incredible, and make you feel truly immersed in the storyline. They order paints, wallpaper, decorations, props and also your favourite things ever… red herrings! Once everything is good and ready to go, test games are held for all staff members. These are very important as it helps to highlight any issues there are with the game, such as puzzles which don’t work or are too difficult, or where the storyline needs tweaking to match the room a bit more. The test games also help us get a better idea of what difficulty rating the room will be, as we can look at the success rate from the first wave of test games and decide whether more puzzles need to be added to make it a bit more difficult, or take out smaller puzzles to make it a little easier.

Once the test games are finished, the room is ready to open for the public, which is where you guys play your part! We would love to hear any feedback you have from playing our new rooms, so be sure to get in touch and tell us what you enjoyed most about our new room. If you are yet to play any, be sure to head over to ­our Liverpool, Manchester or Cardiff sites to book now!