Houdini's Escape Room Experience - STAR CITY

We went as a group of five (adult) friends with high expectations, following all the reviews here. Unfortunately, the room was extremely tacky and the challenges really straightforward. We were told on arrival that our room (the Hexford school) has only 1* of difficulty, which wasn’t clear on the website. We were then given several clues without requesting them. Considering the £25 charge per person, this was underwhelming and felt extremely overpriced. I’d perhaps recommend this for young children but this is not an experience for anyone over 10 years old to enjoy. The venue is also hidden at the back of the Ten Pin arcade, making it very difficult to find!

Worst escape room venue in Birmingham. Went with my friend, and both of us are very familiar with escape rooms as we have both done well over 20, and found this experience disappointing to say the least, the only positive was our games master for the Hexmore room and their enthusiasm.

The Hexmore room is easy (maybe too easy), one for the kids, and not really for adults as there is a horrible crawl space, way too small and hard on the knees. I will say that it's not puzzle based more spell based and requires a lot of shouting, which is not a bad thing because it encourages involvement in the magic of the room itself.

The RMS Titanic room is harder and requires a lot of running around and again crawling (not fun). Some of the puzzles were interesting enough, however there were some that needed repair and others that needed too much of an explanation to solve.

The Temple Raider room should be easy if the puzzles actually worked and you have an attentive games master. Again some puzzles needed repair, probably urgent repair to some, and generally found the puzzles boring and illogical. The room itself is visually lacking and guess what has another horrible crawl space, plus a very dangerous climbing wall, not safe at all (this is why they give you a waiver to sign).

Altogether the venue needs improvement, I would suggest installing lockers in the reception area instead of making people take their bags and coats with them inside the room, makes it very difficult to actually do anything besides worry about your belongings, and instead of focusing on the aesthetics perhaps focus more on functionally there, people really appreciate a space to put their belongings in. All the rooms have crawl spaces, why? I found that the staff were not very good at debriefing at the end of each room, there was a lack of promotion and not customer friendly upon leaving the premises. Get rid of the charm rewards, give customers an earned discount on their next booking, the rooms on a whole are not worth the money compared to other brilliant establishments within Birmingham. I wouldn't recommend this venue to anyone, I would warn people not to go.

Myself and my partner did the temple raider escape room after we got back from our honeymoon. We had an absolute blast, and the room itself was innovative, physical, fun, and different to what we'd done before! But what absolutely made the experience great was the room narrator Ethan - what a legend. He was incredibly sassy whilst being helpful at the same time, and made jokes suited to us as an audience. Ethan you're great. We will be going to the new centre once it's open!

We visited as a family - 2 adults and 13 and 11 year old children. We’ve done escape rooms at six different places and this was the most disappointing by a long way.

It started with promise-the kids were given wizard capes and we all chose a wand. Hexmore is made of two rooms, we went into the first and it went downhill from there.

The puzzles were linear and were almost all dependent on the operator telling us what to do next. It was badly made so, even when we knew what to do, the operator had to help. The room had a taped over hole in the wall and another piece of scenery was broken. The operator had to take us out of the first room and let us into the second room, which broke whatever atmosphere there was. And when they came in to tell us we’d ‘escaped’ we had a general sense of anti-climax (none of this was the operator’s fault).

We paid £50 for us as a family with a special deal over Christmas and it was not worth the money. There are far better escape rooms locally.

It was awesome to get to try out the Temple Raider and the Titanic escape rooms. The level of detail in each of the rooms was so immersive. Tanna was our amazing games master and had us laughing and would get involved in our laughing and joking around, all around an awesome experience and definitely would recommend

Fantastic escape room. Temple escape was great fun, lots of different challenges such as climbing etc. Our host Hash was amazing, made it a really immersive experience and was funny

Came here a couple of months ago to do the escape the titanic escape game and really enjoyed it. I have done nearly 70 escape rooms and I have to say this one of the better escape rooms in Birmingham. Alongside escape hun Birmingham cit centre. My only complaint is that the clues were given way to freely. We were told that we would only get clues if we were behind in time but the phone kept ringing with a clue instead of waiting for us to ask for a clue. When we came out we had finished it in 55 minutes for a 90 minute game. Would of been nice to had more time to try and solve the puzzles ourselves as we still had 35 mins to go and it is more expensive than most escape rooms so would like to of got our money’s worth. Hope they sort that out because other than that it was really good

We did temple raider at the weekend and it was the worst escape room we have ever done (we have done around 40). Firstly, we walked in and sat there for 20 minutes and then finally someone spoke to us. If this had been us that was 20 minutes late, would we have been allowed to carry on? The gamesmaster was new and when giving clues he wasn’t sure what we had already completed. Going in, the manager didn’t give us the back story to the room, although this isn’t a big deal, it sort of set the scene. We went into the first part of the room and the gamesmaster appeared out of no where and stood in the corner, we weren’t made aware that this would be happening. We then spent a good 10 minutes trying to open a box and when we asked for a clue, thinking we had got the whole thing wrong, we were given the code to the box, which we had right, the gamesmaster told us to “pull it or kick it cos it’s broken”.. then there was a lever to pull to bring a ball down, no ball and gamesmaster argued that there was. A couple of the puzzles hadn’t been reset. There were other things but I’d be here all day. I asked a few times for them to just let us out but no response. After about 45 mins in there I’d given up completely because I was so unhappy about the whole experience. We then just sort of stood looking around for a bit until the time ran out and had to find our own way out as no one came to let us out of the room.

We spoke to the new manager and she apologised and said she’d just taken over and they’d not had these complaints before, but I can see on here that they have. She offered us to do the Titanic room another time for free but we explained we had already done that room in Southampton and we don’t live near Birmingham. Expected some other compensation but she said beyond what she’d already offered there was nothing more she could do.

Very very unhappy and would avoid if you want a good room and go to ClueHQ or Escape Live instead.

Had such an amazing time thanks to the leader of the room Sophie.

She made really good voices that made the kids experience much more fun & exciting .

A fun day out for the kids will definitely be taking them again.

Visited today and took on the Escape from H.M.S Titanic room. Our host Lucy was very thorough and really set the scene. The room was really well put together with some cool little props adding to the atmosphere. Will definitely be back to try their other room in the near future. Definitely recommended.