These days, one our favourite ways to spend our Friday evenings is by heading to one of London’s numerous Escape games. So when we got invited to Battersea to take part in a brand new game by Do Stuff Escape Games called ‘Hostage Hideout’ – we jumped at the chance!

If you’re not aware of what an escape game actually is – it’s a physical adventure game in which you and a group of friends are locked in a room and have to use elements of the room to solve puzzles, codes and locks, and escape within a set time limit – usually 1 hour.

Hostage Hideout follows that exact formula with the plotline as follows; ‘The last thing you heard, as you scrambled to safety through an unmarked door, was that they had taken hostages… You are in a safe place but you must find the clues and solve the puzzles to escape the room. Will your team set the hostages free?’

We headed down last week and while it’s hard to review a game where we can’t give away too many spoilers, it’s fair to say we had an absolute ball. The game was fast, frantic and brilliantly clever. There’s not as many bells and whistles as some of the bigger budget games but for us, the design was perfect – which is no great surprise when you learn that one of the creators studied set-design at University.

The production value was similarly great with the use of video and technology in places. There are some tougher games out there with Hostage Hideout using some classic escape game tricks, but there’s definitely some new things here and the final task was like nothing we’ve come across in the few times we’ve been escape gaming before.

Do Stuff’s Hostage Hideout is open daily with the first game at 12:00 and the final game starting at 21:00. We’d say a team of 3 or 4 is perfect for Hostage Hideout but you could go in with a team of 2 or 5, it just might get a bit cramped at points with a larger team.

Do Stuff Escape Games can be found at The Grove pub (a great little pub which serves decent enough burgers), around a 5 minutes’ walk from Battersea Park Station. Get booking now over at the Do Stuff Website where readers of Joes can get 25% off a game by using the code ‘ESCAPEJOE’. And if you can beat our time of 2 minutes and 38 seconds, we’ll buy you a Curley Wurley or something. Maybe.

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