Skip to main content

Review: The Ruby Factory - Trapped In, Bury

Room Story - from Trapped In

Infiltrate the abandoned Ruby Factory and escape with as many rubies as possible before the security guards return. You will need to use physical and mental skills to operate the disused machinery and extract the rubies. This game isn't about how quickly you can get out, hence it's easy rating. To get on the leaderboard you'll need to collect the most rubies and successfully escape before the guards return.


Key Stats

Room NameThe Ruby Factory
VenueTrapped In
LocationBury, UK
Date23/02/2018
Escape Time59:34
Team Size3
My Recommended Team Size3 - 8

Review

After completing Interstellar, we returned to Trapped In the following week to do The Ruby Factory after reading some good reviews online and enjoying our previous experience at Trapped In. We’d booked the room on a Friday night, so it was an exciting end of week treat. But it wasn’t the most ideal time as we maybe weren’t at our sharpest at the end of the working week!

The Ruby Room is different than other escapes rooms we’ve played as the game involves solving puzzles to earn rubies. The aim of the game is to collect as many rubies as possible. To escape the room, you need to find a code, but there’s a little twist because as soon as you enter the code, the game is over. This ensures there’s a tense ending to the game as you want to use as much time as possible to increase your ruby count, but you don’t want to leave it too late that you don’t escape!

We went with a team of 3 people, but you could easily take much more - the room maximum is 8 people. Given that the room is non-linear and a collection of different puzzles, I do believe you could keep a large group entertained in the room.

When you first enter the room, you’re struck by just how many puzzles there are. With some, it’s immediately obvious what you need to do. However, others only become apparent as the game goes on. As there’s so much in the room and quite a lot of numbers involved, at times you’re not always sure how the different puzzles link together. I’d say a few require some leaps of logic.

As the main aim of the game is collecting rubies, there are only a few hints throughout the game to avoid skewing the leaderboard. There are a few moments in the game where we found ourselves wandering aimlessly as we were unsure how to progress. It caused us to go back and look carefully at things to try to find a way forward.

All of the puzzles in the room are large physical puzzles that have been uniquely designed for the room. We found them really fun to interact with and solve. One particular puzzle was really different to anything I’ve played before and was a really unexpected part of the room, hidden away at the beginning of the game. It involved a few stages and had a really satisfying ending.

When we got to the 50 minute mark, we started to worry about the exit code as we hadn’t found one. Whilst we continually uttered the words “we need to find the exit code”, the rubies proved too alluring so we continued to complete tasks to collect them. When it got to 57 minutes, we started taking the code very seriously and actually came across the answer very quickly. Just to make sure we had definitely got it right, we tried it at 59mins 30s and escaped the room.

We collected a haul of 44 rubies. We found out the average is 30, so we were pleased we got quite a few above the average score. The high score is over 60, so our result was reasonably middle ground. At the end of the game, our host showed us how to solve the remaining puzzles and collect the rest of the rubies. There were a few groans at obvious things we missed and a few surprises that we didn’t think we would have ever worked out!

This is a really different game, great for larger teams and really satisfying when you start to see your rubies rack up. This game isn’t about storyline or detailed theming, it’s all about the satisfaction of completing physical puzzles to collect rubies.

The team were Becky, Beth and Daniel.
Ratings

Overall A room full of challenging physical puzzles with the emphasis on collecting rubies rather than escaping quickly. Really good fun. We escape with 44 rubies – the average is 30 and the high score is over 60.
Difficulty Nobody has ever collected all of the rubies hidden in this room. There are some really challenging puzzles.
Fun There’s a lot to do in the room with some really fun puzzles to get stuck into.
Puzzles The puzzles are interesting and varied, custom built for the room and some themed to the local area.
Immersion This room isn’t intended to be an immersive story telling experience. But you quickly find yourself immersed in the puzzles and the aim of the room.
Surprises Some of the puzzles have a surprise element, but it’s not a room big on surprises.