REVIEW

Casino Heist, the new game at Lakes Escapes on Stanley Street, Workington

If you like a challenge, Lakes Escapes’ new game Casino Heist is perfect for you.

The game is the most exciting one I have played, both at this venue and others. I don’t want to reveal too much – just be prepared for a real adventure.

The premise is that your team has been selected from the best codebreakers and thieves in the country. A notorious criminal gang recruited you to enter an underground casino, where precious diamonds are held in the vault. The problem is you only have 60 minutes to pull off this job.

You also have the opportunity to take nine million dollars, if you have the time to face an extra challenge.

The room has all the elements you would expect from a respectable casino: cards, a Russian roulette, fruit machines, a vault and a security room. Everything in there is brilliantly designed and you actually feel like you are in a real casino. I have done escape rooms before and what I love about them is that you can just forget about the outside world for a full hour and pretend to be a high-profile thief or a private investigator, depending on the scenario you are given.

In my previous attempts, my team had always managed to escape – but not this time. I don’t feel so bad about it, though, as we had been warned it was quite a challenging one, and only one team out of around 50 has managed it so far. If anything it made me want to go back and give it another go!

With hindsight, some of the puzzles were way easier than we made them out to be, but we made the mistake of over-thinking the solution. It was great fun to see my team members get excited when we found the next clue and working together to solve the puzzles. It was my colleague Emma’s first time at an escape room and she could barely contain herself whenever we managed to unlocked a box – I just hope the game master wasn’t deafened by her squeals!