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Review: The Blueprint - Code to Exit, Altrincham

Room Story - from Code to Exit

This room escape will present you with an exciting quest. The goal is to travel back in time to the 1950s. There, you must search and acquire the blueprints of the hydrogen bomb and then return them to the future via the time gate. In order to achieve this goal you have to find the lost parts of the time machine, install them and repair it. The perfect puzzle room, even for beginners.


Key Stats

Room NameThe Blueprint
VenueCode to Exit
LocationAltrincham, UK
Date10/08/2018
Escape Time44:54
Team Size3
My Recommended Team Size3 - 4

Review

After our trip to Edinburgh a couple of weeks below and playing 4 rooms our escape room fund was at an all time low. However, when browsing Groupon I saw a great deal for The Blueprint at Code to Exit. I’d read good things about Code to Exit, so couldn’t resist a bargain to bolster our escape room funds and play a game I’d been interested in playing!

Code to Exit is based amongst a small row of shops on the outskirts of Altrincham – it’s not easily missed with its bright orange facade. In addition to The Blueprint, there are currently two other games at Code to Exit – The Forger and The Dark Ages.

After confirming our booking, we headed straight into the room for our briefing. The room is set in the past and a “time machine” is required to exit the room, but strangely there was no travel backwards in time at the beginning of the room. Then again, it’s sometimes best not to think too hard about escape room logic as being locked in a room for 60 minutes rarely makes perfect sense! After our introduction we began exploring with a simple mission: find the atomic bomb blueprint, travel back to the future and save the world. Simple.

It’s quite a small room, but it’s very well themed with lots of period furniture and features that help to establish the setting of the room. As we began to explore, we started to realise that the room required quite a bit of searching to progress. We enjoy games with lots of searching, but we’re usually not the most thorough...

After a bit of searching, we’d found a few objects and unlocked a few padlocks. We’d also began to amass a pile of documents and letters – there are quite a number of these to be found in this room and it’s sometimes difficult deciphering what is and isn’t relevant.

We reached a stage where we eventually got a little bit stuck and as per usual, our searching was our downfall. I’d also been a bit silly and discounted something I saw earlier as inaccessible, only later to find that it was key to progressing. Once we got going again, with the help of a clue delivered via the TV screen, we started to uncover some of the more clever hiding places in the room that had been used to hide information and objects. Some of these were greatly satisfying to solve.

We eventually found the Blueprint and the necessary items to get the time machine working, firing it up to successfully escape the room. This was a fun room that we feel would be suitable for all levels of escape room experience. My only criticism would be that there are a few red herrings as a result of the many documents you find in the room that unnecessarily distracted us at times. However, they’ve managed to squeeze an awful lot into a small and well themed space with a few nice surprises along the way. We’ll definitely back to play their other games.

The team were Beth, Daniel and Becky.

Ratings

Overall A well themed and fun room with a surprising amount of puzzles packed into a small space. It’s a game that feels suitable for all levels of experience.
Difficulty The puzzles are logical and flow well, but the primary difficulty in this room lies in deciding the relevance of all the bits of information the room throws at you – we ended up with a lot of sheets of paper by the end!
Fun There’s a surprising amount to explore in such a small space, so there’s a fun sense of discovery in this room.
Puzzles Most of the puzzles are searching based, but they’ve used some really interesting and clever ways to hide information.
Immersion It’s a nicely themed room with period furniture and furnishings that give you a sense of the time in which the room is set.
Surprises It’s quite a small space where all the action takes place, so there isn’t much room for any big surprises. But there are some nicely hidden elements involved to solve a few of the puzzles.