Room Story - from Lucardo
Your dreams are always happy and delightful, but tonight something is going wrong. Your wildest dreams of finding the magic numbers are slowly slipping away, through a whirlwind of riddles, puzzles and illusions. Can you solve your way out of this dream before your chances get lost in the subconscious forever? Be aware, things may not be as they appear!
Key Stats
Review
The Dream has been on my to-play list for quite some time and when Lucardo shared a time-limited offer on Facebook to get 20% off, I couldn’t resist diving into my empty escape room fund to book a game. I’d heard good things about The Dream and the theme sounded very appealing and different.
After a joint welcome briefing with a few other teams we separated off and received a briefing about the storyline of The Dream. Our goal for the game was simple; find the winning lottery numbers to escape. We then experienced a very unique and on-theme entrance to the escape room, mimicking the process of falling to sleep to wake up in our dream.
When we opened our eyes, we found ourselves in a brightly decorated room with coloured lights and lots of objects attached to the wall and hanging from the ceiling. Quite a lot of the theming is centred around toys and games, but to be perfectly honest, theming a room on dreams give you a lot of creative licence and lots of themes would have made sense. We began searching around in the relatively low lighting for a while before inadvertently finding a light switch and instantly making our task easier.
This room is heavily padlock based, but we enjoy those sort of games. The great thing about this room is how it uses the decoration and theming of the room to hide the various codes for the locks. There’s quite a lot hiding in plain sight that we sometimes tried to overcomplicate.
We got into a good flow of solving puzzles, however, there were a couple of frustrations along the way. There’s one puzzle that’s immediately obvious as you enter the room that we initially gravitated towards but couldn’t solve it, so decided to save it until later. We came back to it again later on in the game and again couldn’t solve it. After wasting quite a bit of time, we got a clue that the puzzle wasn’t used until the end of the game. Sometimes you just don’t know that you don’t have all the information. There was another puzzle that we thought was perfectly suited to the lottery theming of the game, but the temperamental mechanism meant we spent longer on it than we probably needed to.
As we progressed the game, we managed to obtain some of the winning lottery numbers. When you first enter the room, it’s immediately obvious where you’re going to get the winning numbers from and it gives you a good indicator of your progress through the game. It’s a really satisfying method of delivering the numbers one-by-one as you progress through the game – think of how numbers are delivered on the National Lottery and that gives you a good idea of what I’m talking about.
Towards the end of the game, there were a couple of really good observational puzzles hidden away in the room that required a bit of teamwork to find the right answers. They gave you a feeling of exploration as you seemed to delve deeper into the dream and view flashes of memory to find the right answers.
The room uses a numerical keypad to exit, so once we’d discovered and ordered the winning lottery numbers we dashed for the exit and heard the satisfying beep as we entered the right code to escape.
We really enjoyed this game, apart from a couple of frustrations, we thought the game flowed extremely well and we loved the theming and concept of the room. Escape rooms take you away from reality and give you a sense of escapism (pun not intended) for an hour – in this game, the theming heightened this feeling. However, I can’t say that we felt well rested after our hour “asleep”!
Ratings
Your dreams are always happy and delightful, but tonight something is going wrong. Your wildest dreams of finding the magic numbers are slowly slipping away, through a whirlwind of riddles, puzzles and illusions. Can you solve your way out of this dream before your chances get lost in the subconscious forever? Be aware, things may not be as they appear!
Key Stats
| Room Name | The Dream |
| Venue | Lucardo |
| Location | Manchester, UK |
| Date | 01/09/2018 |
| Escape Time | 51:30 |
| Team Size | 3 |
| My Recommended Team Size | 3 - 5 |
Review
The Dream has been on my to-play list for quite some time and when Lucardo shared a time-limited offer on Facebook to get 20% off, I couldn’t resist diving into my empty escape room fund to book a game. I’d heard good things about The Dream and the theme sounded very appealing and different.
After a joint welcome briefing with a few other teams we separated off and received a briefing about the storyline of The Dream. Our goal for the game was simple; find the winning lottery numbers to escape. We then experienced a very unique and on-theme entrance to the escape room, mimicking the process of falling to sleep to wake up in our dream.
When we opened our eyes, we found ourselves in a brightly decorated room with coloured lights and lots of objects attached to the wall and hanging from the ceiling. Quite a lot of the theming is centred around toys and games, but to be perfectly honest, theming a room on dreams give you a lot of creative licence and lots of themes would have made sense. We began searching around in the relatively low lighting for a while before inadvertently finding a light switch and instantly making our task easier.
This room is heavily padlock based, but we enjoy those sort of games. The great thing about this room is how it uses the decoration and theming of the room to hide the various codes for the locks. There’s quite a lot hiding in plain sight that we sometimes tried to overcomplicate.
We got into a good flow of solving puzzles, however, there were a couple of frustrations along the way. There’s one puzzle that’s immediately obvious as you enter the room that we initially gravitated towards but couldn’t solve it, so decided to save it until later. We came back to it again later on in the game and again couldn’t solve it. After wasting quite a bit of time, we got a clue that the puzzle wasn’t used until the end of the game. Sometimes you just don’t know that you don’t have all the information. There was another puzzle that we thought was perfectly suited to the lottery theming of the game, but the temperamental mechanism meant we spent longer on it than we probably needed to.
As we progressed the game, we managed to obtain some of the winning lottery numbers. When you first enter the room, it’s immediately obvious where you’re going to get the winning numbers from and it gives you a good indicator of your progress through the game. It’s a really satisfying method of delivering the numbers one-by-one as you progress through the game – think of how numbers are delivered on the National Lottery and that gives you a good idea of what I’m talking about.
Towards the end of the game, there were a couple of really good observational puzzles hidden away in the room that required a bit of teamwork to find the right answers. They gave you a feeling of exploration as you seemed to delve deeper into the dream and view flashes of memory to find the right answers.
The room uses a numerical keypad to exit, so once we’d discovered and ordered the winning lottery numbers we dashed for the exit and heard the satisfying beep as we entered the right code to escape.
We really enjoyed this game, apart from a couple of frustrations, we thought the game flowed extremely well and we loved the theming and concept of the room. Escape rooms take you away from reality and give you a sense of escapism (pun not intended) for an hour – in this game, the theming heightened this feeling. However, I can’t say that we felt well rested after our hour “asleep”!
 |
| The team were Becky, Daniel and Beth. |
Ratings
| Overall |  | A very fun room with great flowing puzzles and a very unique and wacky theme from start to finish. |
| Difficulty | | This room is very padlock based and there are a lot of codes to find in the allocated time, however, it all flows nicely. |
| Fun | | We had a lot of fun. The overall aim of the game is to find the winning lottery numbers and this was a really satisfying goal to work towards. |
| Puzzles | | The majority of the puzzles in the room are searching, observation and padlock based, however, there’s a wide variety of fun ways for finding the codes and keys for the various locks. Apart from a couple of puzzles, everything flowed very logically. |
| Immersion | | Theming an escape room on a dream works really well as it gives the designers quite a bit of artistic licence. They’ve done a great job of creating a well-themed and interesting room. |
| Surprises |  | There are a couple of nice surprises at the beginning and end of the game as you’re first introduced to the room and as you are getting close to exiting the room. |