The dastardly Professor BlackSheep has come up with a plan for world domination, launching a satellite that can control our minds in this clueQuest room. Can we break into his lab and stop the baa-d guy’s plan before it is too late?
- Location: King’s Cross (nearest Tube King’s Cross/St. Pancras
- Players: 3-6 (duplicate rooms available)
- We played: March 2019 as a team of 4
Great things about Operation BlackSheep
- Operation BlackSheep, although it has a standard thwart-the-evil-mastermind concept, doesn’t resemble any other escape room – for one thing, it makes exceptionally good use of plastic grass. Colourful, humorous details bring the room to life and give it its own distinctive style. This memorable style and brand identity extends to clueQuest’s other rooms and is manifest from the moment you arrive at the venue.
- This room features a decent range of enjoyable puzzles that were mainly linear, straightforward tasks with a couple of more challenging activities that required teamwork and communication.
- Operation BlackSheep has a few of the kind of surprising moments that make an escape room fun and keep you talking about it afterwards. Objects in the room turn out to be more than meets the eye, and things that have been in plain sight all along become useful later in the game.
- Our upbeat, professional host gave us a thorough introduction to the game, including a safety briefing. He also dealt with a small issue that occurred during the game (a door opening at the wrong time) very effectively, pausing the timer and resolving the issue quickly without letting us see anything that would spoil the end of the game.
On the other hand…
- As in a fair few other escape rooms, players in Operation BlackSheep often find themselves in possession of a code, and multiple padlocks to try it on. We asked after escaping if we had missed some signposting that would have told us which lock needed which code, and were told that trying the codes in different locks was just part of the game. This didn’t detract significantly from our enjoyment, but we’d rather be solving puzzles than fiddling with various padlocks.
Who should try this room?
Escapists who like their secret agent heroes closer to Danger Mouse than to James Bond would enjoy this room’s theme, and both content and puzzles are suitable for children (clueQuest recommend ages 9 and up, supervised by an adult).
Rating – 7/10
Unlock & Roll 