ClueQuest, London – cQorigenes

Now that the UK has lifted restrictions, we decided to make good on a Christmas IOU for a day out to London for an escape room and dinner. Our choice of room was ClueQuest after an excellent visit back in December 2019 for their Operation Blacksheep room. This time we were a team of 4 and we knew we wanted a challenging game. We decided it was time for cQ Origenes.

Professor BlackSheep seeks to recreate the original genetical experiment that turned him into a sheep. He has launched a cyber attack on our old mainframe in the hope of extracting secret data, along with the genetical research he’s missing.

In order to stop the Professor from breaching our firewall, you and your team will have to access Mr Q’s old base. The only way in, however, is to shrink down to the size of a mouse with the help of the Shrink’o’Mat. Word of caution, agents: the technology you’ll be exposed to is…a bit unstable and still experimental. You’ll have only 60 minutes to counteract the cyber attack and secure the mainframe before the Shrink’o’Mat’s effect wears off and things get messy.

Now where to start, I suppose the first place would be to shout out to Rowen, our fantastic games master. She got us right into the vibe of playing this game with an excellent introduction and clearly set out the mission brief. A good games master makes all the different, if your games master is up for really getting into character it can really make for a great escape room experience. And from both our visits to ClueQuest, we’ve had great games masters who have done just that!

The first impression from ClueQuest is a company that knows what they are doing, even the entrance space is well designed and fabulously on brand, it all gets you in the right space to play your game.

We went into the room and we were off. First thing first, we needed to get ourselves down to the size of a mouse to be able to complete our mission successfully. With only 60 minutes to activate the shrink-o-mat, stop Professor Blacksheep from his evil plan and to get ourselves back to size we knew we were up against the clock!

The room was beautifully put together, lots of thought has clearly gone into the game design to make it stand out, there is brilliant use of technology and a step away from many very traditional elements which you normally see in escape rooms, in this one you need to think creatively about how you input the codes you discover! The decoration of the room has excellent attention to detail and is truly immersive.

The puzzles are clever and there were some different types of puzzles to ones we had come across previously. We really liked the puzzles which utilised light and technology. The room had an excellent combination of parallel and linear sections with lots for us all to do, but at the same time some of the elements linked together brilliantly to help build up the story within the game. This is the most hi-tech room we’ve played and it really utilised the technology well to really add to the story line, where other rooms have used tech for the sake of using tech.

I’m starting to feel like I’m gushing over here. We worked our way well through the room, a team who had played games together before and we know how to communicate well with each other. We were smashing our way through with two small nudges for our games master to keep us on track. The delivery of the clues was again excellent and on theme.

All ClueQuests live games and most of their Print + Cut + Escape games are utilising the same characters and broad story line. Their artwork is distinctive and again runs very consistently throughout their games.

Overall, we came away from this room absolutely thrilled with our experience. This room is the new favourite and the room other games are going to be compared to. It’s a tricky room and one that if you want to play I would recommend playing a few other rooms first, it’s tricky and a room so good you want to play other games to appreciate it’s brilliance! We escaped in a time of 49:39. I’ve finally found what a room needs to do to be deserving of a massive score of 5/5! ClueQuest, we will be back for your other two rooms, just you wait!

Difficulty 5/5

Atmosphere 5/5

Variety 5/5

https://cluequest.co.uk/escape-room-london