Escape Plan, Shoreditch- The Battle of Britain

It’s been a while since I last posted, I’ve done some escape rooms but not many in the mean time. Some were good, some were not ….

I can say that Battle of Britain at Escape Plan in Shoreditch does count as one of the good ones 😉

Not being Londoners ourselves we don’t come to the Capital to play games very often, but we ventured down to meet some regular teammates who are Londoners for a day in the big city. We’d seen a lot of great reviews for Battle of Britain, and I was surprised for my birthday with a trip to come and play the game.

Samual was our host and was excellently chatty, presented our introduction and scenario well.

I really liked the fact that we had the option to take pictures in the room (though by habit I left my phone in the locker, thankfully my teammate was ready to take the great shots)

As the title suggests the scenario is based all around the Battle of Britain, the main entrance to the Operations Room at RAF Uxbridge has been destroyed, the Lufftwafe are coming and a counter attack needs to be launched, you must find the hidden back door to the operations room, enter and prepare numerous squadrons for deployment to intercept the Germans.

It’s clear as you play through the game the thought and care that has gone into designing and refining the game, it was interesting speaking to Samual afterwards around some of the points of refinement and how careful they have been to allow a group to split down and tackle separate puzzles simultaneously while also ensuring that people don’t become so separate they miss what is happening in the rest of the game.

The game is one where good communication can really ease the flow, and it’s clearly invested in the elements of good design which make the ending especially satisfying.

One thing I really like about the game is not only do you have the traditional 60 minute time limit (apparently there may be a glitter bomb for those who don’t make it out, I’m not convinced the hosts want to put themselves through cleaning that up though) the game does also have a scoring aspect which brings in an element of accuracy, how many of the enemy squadrons have you managed to shoot down?

Being very competitive by our nature we were after a perfect score with no hints. I like the way the game is designed without a lot of red herrings on the decoration, it almost all serves a function in one puzzle or other. You get a lot of different puzzles in the game so aren’t short of things to do!

We found our rhythm very quickly and we’re soon smashing through the puzzles. A lot of the signposting was nice and subtle, it was there but not so super obvious. There is a really good central puzzle to the room with a lot of surrounding puzzles that feed into the main one. The operations room itself was well decorated and kept us talking for quite a while after, it’s been decided it had one of the best props we’ve come across so far!

After the game we chatted to Samual for a bit, discussing bits we really liked about the game and picking up some other suggestions of games and locations to go and seek out.

We scored 71/71 plans downed with 0 hints and in a time of 44 minutes on the dot! Overall we’re giving Battle of Britain 5/5 so while not the most difficult room we’ve ever done it was so well presented and thought through, this one will stay a favourite for sure!

Difficulty 4/5

Atmosphere 5/5

Variety 5/5