The best escape rooms: London 2020

The Riddle Within, Greenwich

These escape rooms experts have teamed up with Studio 338, one of London’s largest clubs, to create two sky-high evasion experiences. In Flight 338, a real-life plane in the club grounds is styled as a prisoner shipping craft, with guests left to riddle their way out.

A second experience comes by way of Chernobyl: 10 Seconds to Midnight, a recreation of the HBO series based on the nuclear disaster. You and your team are in the control room on that fateful night – can you avoid the explosion this time around? Providing family-friendly and high-intensity options, The Riddle Within pitches escape mania just right.

A third ‘room’, Escaping Bad, is set to launch in June 2020. Inspired by a certain cult TV show with a similar sounding name, the experience begins in a shady looking RV, where escapees must use codes and chemistry to cook the purest product.

Group size: up to six players

Time to escape: 75 minutes

Cost: £20 – £29pp depending on group size and time

AIM Escape Rooms, Whitechapel

The four challenges at AIM Escape Rooms aren’t like those you will have played elsewhere. What’s more, they’re all the more chilling for being rooted in scenarios you might have seen in popular films. There’s Psychopath’s Den, a gruesome, Saw-esque horror house where players must solve ‘fiendish puzzles’ to save their skin. Then there’s Patient Zero 2150, where players must contain a bio-threat in the form of a virus let loose by rogue scientists.

At the lighthearted end of the scale, there’s Hangover Déjà Brew. Perfect for stag or hen dos, the experience asks teams to find out what happened to an AWOL groom who’s gone missing after a big night out before his wedding. And for families, there’s a spy-fuelled romp set in a restaurant, Spy Heroes, where teams must save their kidnapped friend.

Group size: 5 players

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £25 - £40pp depending on group size and time

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The Game is Now: Sherlock Escape Room, Shepherd's Bush

The creators of the BBC's hit Sherlock series invite us to play detective. The Game is Now escape room combines Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's intriguing story-telling, sets crafted by the Sherlock series production company and expertise from escape room veterans Time Run. The result is impressively authentic and puzzling.

Set in multiple rooms across a large, labyrinthine space in Shepherd's Bush, this escape room experience feels bigger-budget than most (and inevitably is costs more, too). But the narrative and challenges reflect the high quality props and spaces, resulting in a memorable and brain-bending adventure.

Group size: 4 – 6 players

Time to escape: 100 minutes

Cost: £54

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Breakin’ Escape Rooms, Highbury & Islington

There are no fewer than seven heavily-themed rooms here. You and your fellow team members can attend a wizarding school where you’ll need to learn spells to charm your way through a series of tests; help a superhero defend his city against an evil genius; solve a mystery with Sherlock himself; escape a pirate ship before becoming a member of its ‘undead’ crew; overthrow a regime in space; escape your cannibalistic lecturer’s lair; or join a gang of street racers and take part in a major bank heist. The rooms are ranked by difficulty, helping you find the right challenge for your group.

Group size: 3 – 6 players

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £19 – £29pp depending on group size and time

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Enigma Quests, Moorgate

Your team can choose between two intricately designed escape rooms at Enigma Quests. The Million Pound Heist will see you break into the safehouse of a notorious gang of London criminals and try to navigate your way through top level security before attempting to enter the vault with the prize money.

Teams who prefer their fun crime-free, meanwhile, can enroll in the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where the challenge is to work as a team to pass a number of tests in order to prove your status as a witch or wizard. You’ll then use your newly-acquired magic skills to defeat the dark forces. Two further rooms at Enigma Quests – a submarine escape and interstellar escapade – are not currently available to book.

Group size: 3 – 5 people

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £24 – £30pp depending on number of players

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AI Escape, Bermondsey

There are two rooms at Archimedes Inspiration (aka. AI Escape), both with a strong narrative focus. Kill Mad is a psychological thriller set in an abandoned and haunted hospital. Project Delta, meanwhile, is a sci-fi thriller set on board a spaceship in the year 2052. Both challenges require strong analytical skills and are not recommended for escape room novices.

Group size: 3 – 6 players for Kill Mad / 3 – 5 players for Project Delta

Time to escape: 70 minutes for Kill Mad / 100 minutes for Project Delta

Cost: £35pp for Project Delta / £26 – £30pp for Kill Mad depending on group size

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Mission Breakout, Camden

With its setting in the former South Kentish Town tube station, escape room games don’t get much more immersive than Mission Breakout. The station closed its doors to the public in 1924, but rumours of ghostly presences trapped inside its tunnels linger on. One of the two escape room experiences here is The Lost Passenger, based on the story of Mr. Brackett, who alighted at South Kentish Town station when a train accidentally stopped there following the station’s closure and was never seen again.

The second is Codebreakers, which shifts the focus away from the station’s history and is instead a WWII game focused on decoding secret messages sent between the Nazis. In both games, you and your fellow team members will be locked inside a room in the historic building where you’ll work together to find clues and solve a series of puzzles in order to escape.

Group size: up to 12 players

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £28pp

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Hint Hunt, Euston

Hint Hunt is London’s original set of escape rooms and is comprised of five different challenges. You and your team could work to restart the engine on a submarine before it's too late; go on a quest to find a second, sunken submarine; find evidence to prove a falsely-convicted murder suspect’s innocence; solve a robbery and escape a room in Tokyo; or prevent fraud that would leave you bankrupt – this final one can even be brought to your office and played there instead!

Group size: 3 – 5 players

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £20 – £27pp depending on group size

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Escape Rooms, London Bridge

Kitted out with laser beams and strobe lighting, Escape Rooms at London Bridge have a slightly more high-tech look and feel than some of their competitors. You and your team can escape from one of two rooms: Pharaoh’s Chamber, a cursed tomb set in the heart of Egypt’s oldest pyramid, where you’ll have one hour to find the treasure flames of the gods in order to escape; and Room 33, where you’ll travel from the year 1675 in China to present day London – room 33 of the British Museum, to be precise. Here you’re tasked with searching for a missing vase in order to prevent your execution at the hands of KangXi, Emperor and great ruler of the mighty Qing Dynasty.

Group size: 3 – 7 players

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £20.40 – £25.20pp depending on group size

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Escape Land, Soho

Escape Land, otherwise known as Escape Rooms London, will see your team take on one of two challenges: Right to the Throne, where you’ll puzzle over what happened to the rightful heir to the throne of an empire and work to restore peace over the land; and Da Vinci’s Exploration, where your team will take up the quest to find the Holy Grail with its promise of eternal life. You'll need to be quick, though, evil forces are working hard to find it before you.

Group size: 3 – 6 players

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £22 – £26pp depending on size of team

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The Crystal Maze, West End

Perhaps the most well-known and best-loved experience of this kind in London, the Crystal Maze is a chance to don a satin bomber jacket, jump into the hit 90s TV show of the same name and muddle through a series of challenges against the clock. The premise is this: teams are guided by an eccentric maze master through four different adventure zones – Aztec, Industrial, Futuristic and Medieval – completing tasks along the way.

Group size: 1 – 7 players

Time to escape: Roughly 80 minutes

Cost: £49.99 – £64.99pp depending on size of team

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Do Stuff Escape Games, Battersea

Hostage Hideout is the original of the two challenges on offer at Do Stuff Escape Rooms in Battersea. The premise, as the name suggests, is that your team are hiding in a safe space having been taken hostage and must now solve a series of puzzles to escape. A second room called the Pie & Mash Shop is not, as the name suggests, the venue's onsite restaurant; it’s a second, slightly more challenging escape room. Here, you’re tasked with finding out what happened to the missing pie shop owner Albert Bow before time runs out.

Group size: 2 – 5 players

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £20 – £40pp depending on group size

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Eltham Escape Rooms, Eltham

Eltham’s entertainment scene recently got a whole lot more exciting for puzzlers who like cracking codes, thanks to the opening of Eltham Escape Rooms. Just one of the venue's three planned rooms is currently open, though. Called Temporal Tours, the challenge in this sci-fi-themed room is to escape the 'Chronos One' ship before it explodes. A second room, Robotic Asylum, is opening soon as a two-player VR experience where players inspect a crime scene Cluedo-style. The third room is yet to be finalised, but is penciled in as a WW2 themed room based on real history and facts, where players uncover a spy ring within the British Intelligence.

Group size: 2 – 8 players

Time to escape: 60 minutes

Cost: £19 – £25pp depending on group size

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The Grid, Southwark

The one thing you shouldn't do when playing The Grid is mention it. Your task is to infiltrate the offices of evil start-up Neosight and defeat its AI technology in order to save humanity from extinction.

Participants pose as volunteers to help Neosight programme its machines across multiple rooms, going undercover to fight for a bigger cause. Thankfully, protecting civilisation can be achieved while consuming specially-designed sci-fi cocktails at The Grid's futuristic Bankside location.

Group size: up to 8 players (larger groups are possible but require special booking)

Time to escape: 90 minutes

Cost: £29.99 – £34.99pp (ticket price includes two cocktails)

Click here to book