Submarine WaveBreak Review | You are an emergency response unit sanctioned with the mission of saving the world. An unknown Global corporation are on the cusp of destroying vast areas of Earth. It is down to you to stop them. Work together to figure out how to take control of this Nuclear submarine and divert it from international destruction.

Date Played: 15th May 2022
Time Taken: 30 minutes
Number of Players: 4
Difficulty: Medium

Some people make pancakes on Sunday morning, other people enjoy a lie-in. Me and my friends? We save the world from nuclear disaster… Well actually, we technically messed up on that part, so perhaps we plunged the world into a nuclear winter due to our inability to read basic instructions. Either way… Sunday morning at Enigma Quest is nothing if not dramatic!

Submarine WaveBreak is the very last escape room in the Enigma Quest group we hadn’t yet played. So, with the sad news that I’ll soon be moving from London, I made myself an escape room bucket list and 100% finishing Enigma Quest was high up on that to-do. From the Million Pound Heist, to School of Witchcraft and Wizardry we have a feel for the unique flair that makes Enigma Quest special by now.

With Submarine WaveBreak, we were not disappointed!

About Submarine WaveBreak

Submarine WaveBreak is your ‘classic’ (if such a genre exists) nuclear submarine themed escape room. Our mission was simple but had devastating consequences for getting wrong: save the world from an imminent nuclear disaster. So, no pressure?

Our Enigma-tic hosts were John and Taylor. One of them was brand new to the venue and getting to grips with hosting a room, but honestly they were both so much helpful and knowledgeable it was impossible to tell who was trainer and who was trainee.  After delivering an enthusiast briefing about the experience, we promised our hosts that we’d save the world. Besides the fate of humanity on the line, our hosts had a pub quiz to get to later on, so it was imperative that we did our best.

From here, the big submarine doors swung open and we were immersed in the underbelly of a vast submarine, complete with high tech looking control panels, vast pipe networks, curious keys, and crates galore. Submarine WaveBreak is one of those rooms were you can pretty much see the entire physical space from your first vantage point, though there are plenty of doors to get through before then. It’s a large space subdivided into multiple spaces that represent different parts of the submarine.  The experience involved in a partially-linear, partially-non-linear format which culminated in a final meta puzzle that truly tested our attention. But, I’m getting ahead of myself…

With our mission in hand, we were off to a flying start.

Solving the Submarine

In terms of puzzles, Submarine WaveBreak was a comfortable ‘medium’ in difficulty. As with non-linear escape rooms, there were plenty our team spotted right away and leapt into action, splitting off to focus on our own thing. We divided and conquered and only came together when it was time to proceed to the next room or an in-room meta puzzle.

Technically speaking, there was nothing in the room we hadn’t seen before – but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a blast playing through it. Each puzzle worked really well together in the entirely and made for a very fun puzzle flow from start to finish.

Whilst no spoilers here, you can expect to encounter plenty of pieces of equipment and puzzles you would expect to see in a submarine, with one or two fun twists on the genre. There were some pattern recognition puzzles, some two player collaborative puzzles, plenty of reading, some fun uses of equipment, and a very fun pipes puzzle. Some of them we triggered with mechanical actions in the room, but others we could tell were activated remotely by our games master on successful completion *cough cough* read as the puzzle triggering as correct before we’d actually hit a button. But it was all satisfying good fun.

In fact, when all is said and done, if not for missing a detail on the final puzzle (and accidentally blowing up the world – oops! Sorry!) we would have broken the game’s record for fastest completion time.

So, a little more on that ‘final puzzle’. If this were my first Enigma Quests experience I might have been more disappointed, but actually a surprise twist ending that requires extra attention is one of the company’s unique features, and I was half expecting to encounter something like this in the submarine. It’s no spoiler to say your goal is to deactivate the nuclear weapons. This means that the whole room centres around the one key meta puzzle of “right, how do we do this?”. Along the way you collect details and snippets of information that will help you in your final puzzle. But unlike in other Enigma Quests rooms, the Mission WaveBreak final puzzle is brutal. One chance to hit the big red button, and if a single switch (out of hundreds) is wrong, it’s game over.

For that reason, I can’t see many teams successfully escaping… But I might just be jaded by our own failure, even though we’d expected the twist and triple checked our answers before hitting the button. Thankfully, success or failure in this room doesn’t make too much of a difference. You escape, and you had a fun time along the way. It’s really quite simple and that’s all you could ever want from an escape room. Instead of the “Yay, you escaped” spiel, we got a funny “Oh no, the world is destroyed” one instead.

The Verdict

Enigma Quests is pretty much always a good time! Mission WaveBreak was no different – a light hearted romp through a nuclear submarine fit with nice decorations and well thought-out puzzles that worked seamlessly for us. It’s a good sign that every time we’ve shown up to play there’s always been a queue of people outside.

Despite our failure on the final puzzle, it was a fun Sunday morning escape room spent with good friends and two excellent Games Masters.

Mission WaveBreak can be booked by heading to Enigma Quest’s website here.