London’s best escape rooms

You can't move for ’90s nostalgia these days, and that’s where the allure of this particular experience lies. Painstakingly reconstructed sets from the original cult TV series make you really feel like you’re on the show.  The Crystal Maze is a test of your physical and mental skills and endurance. It might take twice as long as your average escape room, but it’s worth it for the amount of fun you’ll have here. The more challenges you complete, the more crystals you win and the more time you’ll have for the final test in the Crystal Dome. It’s just like you’re in the telly. Start the fans please!

Address: 22-32 Shaftesbury Avenue, W1D 7EU

Price: £62 standard ticket, £73 premium ticket, £56 family ticket

Sherlock fans were quivering in their deerstalkers when it was announced that a purpose-built escape game based on the BBC drama was going to open in London. It’s easy to be cynical about the decision to tap into the escape game boom, but this is not some ‘inspired by’ cash-in. Writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss (who also played Mycroft) teamed up with escape-game-maker Time Run to make this happen, and their sharp, sardonic tone runs right through the experience. When we visited, the journey began in ‘Doyle’s Opticians’ (as in Arthur Conan), a cover for a ‘spy training agency’, and continued through replicas of familiar sets with new footage featuring maniacal Irish villain Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott), exasperated Dr Watson (Martin Freeman) and supercilious Mycroft. As Holmes himself would say, here, the game is afoot. 

Address: Doyle's Opticians,W12 Shopping Centre, W12 8PP. 

Price: From £30 for kids and £35 for adults

We’re big fans of what these guys do. Not only do they create brilliantly fiendish noodle-scratchers, they do so in very creative ways. There’s peril around lots of corners that will make you want to hurry up your problem-solving and get out. You can take on dream roles as an undercover sky or a ghostbuster in a haunted hotel or plunge yourself into your own horror movie scenario as you try to escape the clutches of an evil psychopath. The room where you have to contain a deadly pathogen might trigger unwanted memories of lockdown, but, all in all, there’s loads of fun (and a few screams) to be had here.

Address: Goodman‘s Fields, 8 Canter Way, E1 8PS

Price: From £31

The eight rooms at this Holloway Road escape game pull inspiration from some of your favourite movies and will take you from the high seas to blood-soaked lairs. You can either be the victim or the villain – as the former, try and escape the grasp of a serial killer with a taste for human flesh or pick up a wand and summon your best spells to defeat a magical monster. As the latter, become a New York street racer on a mission to rob a series of banks, or join Davy Jones’ pirates in looting a sinking ship.

Address: 89 Holloway Rd, N78LT

Price: From £29

If the idea of being locked in a room fills you with dread then SENSAS might be a good escape room option for you. This attraction in one Vauxhall’s railway arches doesn’t really involve any escaping at all, but rather a seriously entertaining multi-sensory team challenge with an important message behind it. In teams of 4-15, you’ll work your way round a series of themed rooms each designed to test one of your five senses. The idea is that it demonstrates just how much we would all struggle when deprived of any of these. As you move through the game, tasting, sniffing and feeling your way to victory, you’ll also collect points that will be converted into a cash donation towards a local partner charity supporting people with disabilities. 

Address: Arch 17 Miles St, SW8 1RZ

Price: From £38 per person (minimum four players)

There may well be more to being recruited as a spy than an hour of codebreaking, briefcases and teamwork, but if it’s even half as exciting in real life as this escape game, then it’s no wonder MI5 is so selective. The evil ovine dictator Professor Black Sheep is the villain across all four rooms. In Revenge of the Sheep, your team must search high and low to solve clues and crack codes before he turns us all into clones of Dolly. And in Origenes, the most challenging room, you’ve got to stop him from recreating the original genetic experiment that turned him into a sheep. There are no scary or gory elements to clueQuest’s games, so this is an escape room experience that can get the whole family involved. 

Address: 169-171 Caledonian Road, N1 0SL

Price: From £30.99 per person

Those of a nervous disposition, look away now: Enigma Escape is a problem-solving, team-working one-hour escape challenge with a gory plot at its centre. The Killer is pleasingly physical – you won’t need muscle or anything but it’s fun to be solving puzzles by actually doing things rather than just thinking really hard. Looking for something more politically-driven? Tackle The Darkest Hour instead and trawl Winston Churchill’s private lounge for a nuclear device hidden in a Cold War-era secret command centre.

Address: 10 Hornsey St, N7 8EG

Price: From £35

Test your puzzle-solving abilities at this west London escape game. Each of the five rooms is themed (a haunted cabin in the woods, witchcraft and Da Vinci among them) and teams from two up to seven have one hour to get out by deciphering codes, opening locks and unearthing clues. A second location in Whitechapel gives even more opportunities to use your noodle to win back your freedom, from a casino heist theme to the Mayan temples. Suitable for children aged ten upwards.

Address: 117 Uxbridge Rd, W12 8NL

Price: £39.50 per person

Here, players choose between tackling The Billion Pound Heist, takinf on the Inventor’s Odyssey Through Time or trying their hand at the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The latter is a magical experience which takes its theme from literature’s most famous boy wizard. Your team of three to five people must graduate from a school of witchcraft and wizardry by solving puzzles and tracking down clues. The runes, potions, charms and spells are held in specially designed rooms that are brimming with detail and clever surprises.

Address: 2-12 Wilson Street, EC2M 7LS

Price: £25 per person

Escape Rooms’ one-hour games will confront you with plenty of exciting effects to keep you all on your toes. There are two themed games to choose from, one based in the cursed chamber of an Egyptian pharaoh, and the other a room in the British Museum containing a precious Chinese porcelain which needs returning to its rightful owner. 

Address: 134 Tooley Street, SE1 2TU

Prices: From £27 per player (three minimum)

This is the sort of escape game that could only have been made a few years into the genre’s lifespan: cleverly subverting a few of the usual tropes in a way that has the potential to cheekily wrongfoot seasoned players. It’s also a tad trickier than a lot of games – it claims that there’s only a 50 percent success rate. If you really love this game and want another go, returning players can have another crack for free – you just need three paying players on any booking.

Address: Wentworth St, E1 7SA

Price: £38 per person (minimum three players) 

Being set inside the old South Kentish Town tube station, which closed to the public in 1924, is part of the appeal of this WWII-themed escape game effort, with staff dressed in 1940s army gear and corridors pumped with dry ice as you enter the building. There are thwo tube-themed games to play (plus one Enigma one) – the futuristic Underground 2099 or The Lost Passenger, based on the true story of the disused station. Whichever you choose, you only have an hour to get out.

Address: 141-145 Kentish Town Rd, NW1 8PB

Price: From £28

No Escape has four venues and seven escape scenarios to choose from (including its Holloway ‘Engima Escape’ above). One at the Oxford Street branch will have you attempting to evade a murderous dentist in just 60 minutes. As you arrive for your ‘check-up’, you and your team will be locked in the surgery room and forced to solve cryptic clues in order to escape. It’ll strike new fear into you next time you pay a visit to your own dental surgery. The other rooms at this location have you escaping a demon barber and making your way through a haunted Toy Store. 

Address: 51 Oxford Street, W1D 2EF

Price: £40 per person 

Omescape combines two trends in the IRL games scene – escape rooms and virtual reality. Here, you’ll don a headset and grab a controller, and roam freely with your pals through various VR scenes. You can choose from the sci-fi Eclipse, step into Indiana Jones’ shoes in Jumpers, go steampunk in Huxley or much more. Other than being way more technically advanced than your average escape room, the main principles here are the same – find clues and crack puzzles to earn your liberation from the story you select.

Address: Arch 85, Scoresby Street, SE1 0XN

Price: From £30 per person

This 60-minute escape challenge is a fun experience with the odd bit of clever tech thrown in. It’s probably more one for people who’ve never done an escape game before, with at least the Bank Heist game feeling as though it was a couple of puzzles too short. Other scenarios include hunting down the killer of a 1930s West End actress and stopping a mad scientist from selling a toxin that has the power to control the human race. High stakes stuff.

Address: 5 George Yard, EC3V 9DH

Price: From £29.50