I never expected that the first time that I failed* to escape an escape room on time, it would be in the comfort of my living room.
And yet that’s exactly (kind of) what happened when I took on the newest escape-at-home box, Trapped.
*Note: I was taking photos throughout for the blog, so I’m not reallyyyy counting this as a failure. But it was still a very stressful moment when we were seconds from getting through the door and heard the stopwatch start ringing.
Trapped Escape Room Games
I was invited to try out one of Trapped new boxsets. There are three currently available: Art Heist, Carnival and Bank Job, each of varying levels of difficulty. They’re designed for up to six people, but considering the experience Tim and I have in escaping, I figured we’d find our best match with the hardest one – Bank Job.
You set up the props around your living room, bedroom or theoretically any room, then you and up to five friends set the timer and race around unpicking the problems that you face.
Bank Job
Crack the Clues. Open the Vault.
You and your team are a gang of bank robbers, infamous for your safe-cracking skills. Your intel suggests a shipment of gold has just been delivered to the SOVO Bank… Locked in a secure vault and under heavy surveillance, can your team pull off the crime in the nick of time? You’re safe for now but after sixty minutes you need to make a critical decision: finish the mission or abort – and run!
~ Trapped Escape Room Games
Theming
As mentioned, we put up the game materials ourselves, and honestly there’s no way of making our living room look like a legit bank vault. The game materials, while well designed, were just made of paper at the end of the day.
Despite this, there were a few nice touches. The “security cameras” for each corner of room were attached with bendy plastic, and the pressure pads scattered around the entrance. It was an interactive experience that got us hyped up for the rest of the game.
Compared to opening up an EXiT Game (which I have yet to actually review on here), the experience was a lot more intriguing from the start.
Puzzles
The first part of the game was to find all the elements that had been hidden around the room. This would have been much better if there had been more of us attending – if Tim and I could have set up the room for a couple of friends we invited round, and then also hidden a couple from each other as well.
Once we got to the actual puzzles, a lot of them were pretty good. There were quite a few hands-on elements, including at least two that required coordination and would have been much harder done with one person.
One of the big issues I tend to have with escape-at-home games is that they often oversell how many people they’re good with, and can usually be done easily by two people. This game was the opposite – four people would have really added to the experience, although I still think that six might have been pushing it.
There were a couple of puzzles that we had issues with, particularly a single item puzzle that required you to simply guess what the puzzle was asking you to do. In the end, we turned to the answer book to find out what we were actually looking for, and after we know what they wanted it was rather straightforward to work out the answer.
Unfortunately, there was one big issue with the format. At one point, you are given a ‘checksum’ – a way to confirm that you have the right solutions before looking at the answer page, since doing that would essentially end the game if you got them wrong. The problem is that, if your answers don’t align with the checksum, there’s no easy way to work out which of your answers is incorrect. You need to go back and double check each of the puzzles in turn. If there had been a way to confirm the answers as we went, that would have be much more preferable.
Despite a definite stall in momentum when we were comparing our answers to the checksum, we managed to get the right answers and find the gold! But it didn’t end there, and the final part of the puzzle was a massive laugh – even if we did end up not quite making it out of the ‘bank vault’ until a few seconds after our time was up.
Summary
More of a party game than a genuine escape room experience, with some truly fun elements and a couple of sticking points where the format collides with reality. I’d try it again if I was having a few friends over for drinks and games, but probably not on my own with my partner.
Theme: 2.5/5 | Puzzles: 3.5/5 | Difficulty: 3.5/5
Clue system: coded answer booklet
Success: technically no (though I did waste a lot of time with pictures)
I received the Trapped escape room box free of charge, but all opinions of escaping are my own. Here’s my full disclaimer.