Plan52 escape room at clueQuest

Ever since trying my very first escape room in Canada last year I've loved this strategic adventure game where you have to put your puzzling skills to the ultimate test to uncover a mystery and (as the name may give away) escape from a locked room – usually several consecutive ones, where each room gets just a little trickier than the one before. It's an activity that has really gathered popularity in recent years with a variety of adventures popping up across the UK capital too and this week I had the chance to try the first game at clueQuest near King's Cross: Plan 52.

The mission at clueQuest sounds simple: you're a part of a secret organisation head up by Mr. Q and you have to discover the identity of the spy that has gone to the dark side and joined the big villain of the game: Professor Blacksheep. You're given 60 minutes to unlock an undefined number of rooms to uncover the secret and just a single walkie talkie to connect with home base (the excellent Louis in our case) if you get completely stuck.



The first bit is always the most overwhelming where there are so many padlocks, puzzles and secret numbers around the room that you don't know where to start, but once we got going our team was doing very well (in fact, Louis said if we'd continued as quickly as we had in the first room we could've made their all-time leaderboard!). On my own I would've absolutely failed as some elements of the room that were obvious to others I completely missed. However, there were a few points where I contributed something new to our efforts too (my shining moment was to do with clocks and I'll leave it there to not spoil it for anyone else), which made me feel like I was genuinely contributing to the team efforts!



And there is very little else I can actually reveal about this particular room as the kind of puzzles it involves is of course top secret as I wouldn't want to ruin the mission for other spies to follow... I will say that it was a lot of fun and there were some very interesting puzzles that were completely different to anything I've done before (though to be fair, I've only done two other rooms so far but I'm hoping to explore many more in London this year, getting a little better each time). Of course it did help that we managed to get out with time to spare and we only called the help line once, which made us feel good about our problem- and puzzle-solving skills 😏

Thanks very much to clueQuest and Love Pop Ups London for organising this super fun trip in exchange for an honest review. The escape room is located on 169-171 Caledonian Road in London and you can find out more about the different adventures they offer, pricing and timings on their missions page.