Escape Tour Oxford

The Radcliffe Camera in Oxford. The starting point for your escape.

Some time ago we were gifted an Escape Tour of Oxford. We're big fans of puzzles, so it offered a novel way to experience a city we know well.

The locations and clues are all provided through a mobile app. In total you're given four hours to complete the tour, but need to finish it within two to have a chance of making the leaderboard. With the time needed to walk between the locations, as well as working out the answers, you can't hang around.

We had fun solving the puzzles, but it wasn't always clear what they wanted. For example; in one scenario you needed to find the colour of some objects. The objects were made up of multiple colours, but they only wanted one for each. Another asked for a single word that turned out to be two separate words stuck together. Beware of auto-correct!

Some of the clues were based on things that have remained unchanged for decades, but others relied on things that have obviously changed since they were written. I'm not sure when the tour was created, but someone needs to check it over more regularly and make adjustments where necessary.

It's clear that English isn't the first language of the person that wrote the clues. This made some of the wording confusing and a little frustrating. A bit of editing by a native speaker would help a lot.

There are limitations of the app that made things harder than they needed to be. You don't have to be in exactly the right spot to trigger a clue, which meant the object you were looking for may not be visible when the text appeared. It would have been helpful if you could switch back to the map to narrow down precisely where on the street you should be, but this wasn't possible. Another location required taking a photo while lining up something you could see in the real world with an outline on the phone. To do this properly you needed to zoom in on the object you were photographing, but this also wasn't possible.

It's worth having a pen and paper on hand to write things down as you work through the problems. You could use a note app on your phone, but it saves switching back and forth.

As with any escape room, there is a story to go along with the puzzles. Other than providing a reason for moving around the city it doesn't relate much to the locations, but provides some extra entertainment. Overall the story was fairly conventional, but some parts weren't appropriate for younger children. It says on the website that it's recommended for ages twelve and older and I'd tend to agree.

Although we didn't manage to solve all the clues, we did get enough to decipher the final answer and make our escape. It took us two and a quarter hours to complete, so we didn't make the deadline for the leaderboard, but finished well within the four hour limit. On the day we completed it we appeared in position 24 out of 62 on the website (I'm not sure how this list differs from the leaderboard). The bottom 26 teams all had a time of exactly four hours, so probably gave up before completing it.

Given the time constraints I wouldn't recommend it as a way to see a new city, but it could be a fun way to revisit a city you know and discover areas you might not have seen before.