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Mission Breakout is an escape room located inside South Kentish Town tube station, which closed to the public in 1924. It’s touches like this that are very much the appeal of this WWII-themed effort, with staff dressed in 1940s army gear and corridors pumped with dry ice as you enter the building. A video of an actor pretending to be Winston Churchill informs you that you need to help him decode a load of encrypted nazi messages before you’re locked into a room that’s full of impressively authentic-looking WWII-era machinery that you need to use to escape the room in 60 minutes. It’s a very impressive visual spectacle.
The gameplay is perhaps a bit less exciting. At times it can feel less like you’re playing a brilliantly designed game than you are interacting with an impressive set. Rather than multiple puzzles to be taken on at once, there’s only one problem to be solved at a time, which means it lacks the high-energy excitement of other escape games. Nonetheless, it’s a reasonably enjoyable experience. Until, that is, you come to the finale. At which point, it took us a full, hair-pullingly frustrating 20 minutes of pressing the same buttons over and over (and over) again to decode a message. Frankly, the gameplay leaves a little to be desired, but ultimately, how often do you get to take a trip into an abandoned tube station that gives you a fairly decent escape game into the bargain?