Rooms we played at Big Break

Time Travel (review below)

Insomnia (review below)

Review of Time Travel

As soon as we entered Big Break, the hosts reminded us of all the important COVID safety instructions—washing our hands, using sanitisers, maintaining distance. We were also informed that it is acceptable to remove the masks within the room, but we didn't, I guess out of habit. Overall, the importance given to safety reduced our anxiety.

Back to the game, we were briefed that time travel had just been discovered but the inventor made a mistake by changing something in the past causing a butterfly effect. We should now go back in time and correct the mistakes.

Without spoiling too much, as this is time-travel based game, there were multiple rooms from different eras of human history. All the rooms were aptly crafted according to the decade they were based on. Even though there were a wide range and variety of puzzles, the game felt really well structured. Also, this wasn't a room that used padlocks and the puzzles and clues were all well linked to the specific room you were in. Kudos to Time Travel for that!

We knew when the game was about to end since the last room was a high-tech room from the future. We escaped in 50 minutes and were satisfied with our first game in Hamburg. The gamemaster then explained how the elements/clues of the room were all based on events in real life. An educational ending!

After washing our hands again, we quickly jumped to the next game – Insomnia.

Special warning: This game needs you to climb and crawl. Can be difficult for people with accessibility issues.

Escape room review of Insomnia

Insomnia is a room where you are put to sleep (not like that!) to enter your dream. While asleep, you are going to face your inner demon (who doesn't let you sleep?) and rid yourself of the evil. You must wake up or you will be inside your dreams forever.

Now we took the cute entry to enter into the room and got to looking around and searching. It wasn't scary but maybe a bit eerie with the setup and the sound and lighting. We took some time to get used to the sequencing in the room and we used up a couple of clues in the very first room! (so not like us!) After we moved into the next room/s we got in touch with the how and the what of the game.

The game used components of real dreams like the feeling of being stuck, teeth falling, and people staring at you, etc to make it feel like a real but a dreamy experience. And even though this room wasn't as fun as the Time Travel room, we still weren't bored in this dreamworld. We gave it our best and tamed the demon in time, but the room could've had better structure and puzzle-clue connection.

What we appreciate at Big Break is the way the rooms have a backstory and a reason for them. Time Travel had real events and important dates, and Insomnia had real research pointers on dreams installed in their room, and that's a good thing.