Another visit to clueQuest, another dastardly plan to foil. We volunteered to be shrunk to the size of our murine hero, Mr Q, to enter his old lab and counteract Professor BlackSheep’s heinous cyber-attack…
- Location: King’s Cross (nearest Tube King’s Cross St. Pancras)
- Players: 3-6 (duplicate rooms available)
- We played: October 2019 as a team of 6
Great things about cQ ORIGENES
- This is a content-dense room with plenty of sophisticated puzzles that offer a good level of challenge. The tasks are also geared towards engendering co-operation and communication.
- While this room continues clueQuest’s tradition of embracing interesting puzzle mechanisms, it leaves behind an aspect of their previous games that pleased us less: there’s no longer an overwhelming number of padlocks to open.
- cQ ORIGENES has a great flow and sense of storyline progression. As with clueQuest’s other rooms, there’s a clear objective besides simply escaping the room, and you feel yourselves creeping closer to achieving that objective as you solve puzzle after puzzle.
- As always, the theming of the room is outstanding. We really enjoyed being ‘shrunk’ and exploring Mr Q’s oversized and very 90s-style secret base. There are lots of clever touches here that will be rewarding for those who have played one or more of clueQuest’s older games and want to discover the characters’ backstory.
- Where do clueQuest find their game hosts? The staff are always engaging and attentive, and got our group – a mix of experienced escapists and novices who wanted to “try one of those new fangled escape rooms” – in the mood for an adventure.
On the other hand…
- A couple of minor elements could be tweaked to make cQ Origenes even more enjoyable. There is one instance of slightly odd clue placement – although our host told us it’s only an issue in one of the two copies of this game – and one element was slightly broken and made a puzzle more difficult (though this has probably been fixed already!).
Who should try this room?
We’d recommend cQ ORIGENES to anyone; while it’s not an easy room, it still has plenty to make it enjoyable to inexperienced escapists. That said, it has slightly more to offer story-wise if you’ve already played at least one of clueQuest’s other, slightly less challenging games, like Operation BlackSheep or Revenge of the Sheep.
Rating – 9/10
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