ClueQuest: The Dagger of Time

You and your friends are summoned by Kaileena, the Empress of Time to stop an evil being. She restores and gives you the Dagger of Time, an incredibly powerful artifact that contains the very essence of time itself. The dagger contains the Sands of Time, and with it’s power, you’ll be able to manipulate the time to your liking: slow, stop, or even rewind it! Reach the Hourglass Chamber and stop the Magi!

Rating: Incredible!
Completion Time: 1hr 7mins
Date Played: 18th October 2020
Party Size: 2
Recommended For: Videogame Enthusiasts, 16+

The Dagger of Time is HERE! After being teased quite early in 2020 (before *gestures at the world* all this happened), it finally launched this month at ClueQuest! After dabbing our way to victory through Escape the Lost Pyramid back in 2019, I was pleasantly pleased to say the dabbing mechanic is the same … No, improved in The Dagger of Time!

The story goes that you and your intrepid band of adventurers must journey in this virtual reality simulation to ancient Iran, to the brink of a beautiful kingdom quite literally falling apart at the seams. Your guide, the scantily clad Empress of Time Kaileena gives you a mysterious dagger to help you. This dagger can turn back time, literally! You can freeze time, speed it up, reverse it all in one go. Falling rocks? No biggie for me and my dagger. I’ll just pause that right there.

At the end of your adventure is a deadly magi is threatening to destroy time. Or destroy the world. I’m not sure but he’s out to cause a lot of problems for you and your team.

The series has come a long way since it’s arcade debut in the 1980s! I’m a big videogame fan and any sort of VR (or escape room) experience that ties in with a popular game franchise is a huge win for me. The Dagger of Time was thoughtful and respectful to the game origins with some cool new mechanics that only work well in a VR setting.

In particular, I enjoyed this game for its puzzles! It felt as close to a real life escape room as any other VR game I’d ever played, but with the added bonus that you can do things in VR you could never do in real life. Such as scaling enormous heights, crawling monkey bars over ravines, rummaging through cupboards to find clues… Oh wait, that last one you can actually do in a real escape room. But hey! It was twice as fun rummaging in VR. You can also throw things at your fellow players without risk of hurting them.

In terms of puzzles, the feeling of playing Dagger of Time was just like playing a puzzle based videogame. So a little different from your usual escape room experience. This is also recommended as the hardest of the three VR games available at ClueQuest – so perfect for veteran escape room players or gamers. You must do a lot of looking and searching, you must twist dials into place, you must rewind time and freeze it in order to solve several chambers, and there are some interesting colour mixing puzzles I was pleasantly surprised to play!

Overall, we really, REALLY enjoyed it! I’ll let you in on a little secret. My blog is called “The Escape Roomer” because Player 2 (my partner) isn’t really an escape room player. I’m a soloist. Yep, I’ve played rooms before as a team of 1. But you know what Player 2 is? An avid gamer! We really bond over VR escape games. It’s the best of both worlds for somebody not that enthusiastic about escape rooms, but willing to try something exciting and new.

Shout out to our Games Master Miquel!

The Dagger of Time can be booked for £25 pp on ClueQuest’s website.
If you’re not based in London, you can find an escape room that does it near you.