Escape Plan: Pushed for Time | Review

Pushed For Time Review | Pushed for Time is an episodic Escape Room Adventure that starts in front of an abandoned elevator in an old Parisian hotel. You’re here, recruited by Riditure & Co., to trace the disappearance of their salvage engineers. Stuffed in the walls of the elevator, you find some blueprints not seen since 1925. As you investigate the plans, you realise that the only way forwards is back!

Date Played: October 2024
Time Taken: 61 minutes
Number of Players: 5
Difficulty: Medium

Fun fact: I learned Morse Code specifically for Escape Plan. Why on Earth? Well, for the longest time in my life I lived about a 5 minute walk from their venue at Rich Mix in East London, and as an enthusiast in a city with very few amazing games, I ended up playing every room Escape Plan offered. Twice. At least. But it wasn’t until after I moved up to Edinburgh that their first non-WW2 themed escape room, Pushed for Time, opened. Ah well, there goes my only real use for Morse Code!

Pushed For Time is the newest escape room offering and it retains much of the vintage, old timeyness of the company’s other three games, but instead of the 1940s it transports you back a little further in time to the moody, sepia-tinged streets of 1920s Paris and Oxford.

But the standout thing about Pushed For Time isn’t those places you travel to – don’t get me wrong, they are great – the real gem is the method of transportation you’ll use to get there. You see, this is an escape room all about time travel and it might just be the coolest, most fun time travel machine I’ve encountered in any escape room ever.

But wait, let’s go back to the beginning, after all the only way forwards is back.

About Escape Plan, and Pushed For Time

No trip to London is complete without an escape room or two, and since I was in town for the Immersive Experience Network Summit with a few escape room owners and friends we decided to book ourselves in to their newest game before heading back up north.

Escape Plan is located in Rich Mix, a wonderful little arts centre and cinema just a stone’s throw from Shoreditch and Brick Lane. The escape room company doesn’t have a lobby exactly, but you let the team behind the front desk know you’re there for an escape room and someone will come greet you shortly.

On this occasion our Games Master was the fantastic Sarah, who’d been a host for many of us on previous occasions. Since she helped design this room, Sarah was incredibly knowledgeable about all things Pushed For Time and delivered a brilliant briefing once we were upstairs. To get started, we watched through the introductory video which felt more like a recruitment pitch for the enigmatic Riditure & Co. company we’d soon be working for. The goal was simple:

• Go back in time (okay easier said than done)
• Find the blunderbuss (cool!)
• Get back to the present day (somehow much harder than the first bullet point)

You see, many, many years ago time travel technology was developed but it only allowed it’s founders to travel back in time. They never quite cracked the art of returning to the present day. With that in mind, many time travellers were sent back to rescue them and the items they took with them, but each time they all met untimely ends. Now, it was our turn.

No pressure, hey!

Image (c) Escape Plan

Welcome to Riditure & Co. Time Agency

Our briefing over, and we were off on our adventure!

Now, this is an escape room where I feel really strongly that it’s worth going in without any expectations – so we’ll keep the content of this review as spoiler free as possible. There are some brilliant little moments of whimsy that’ll delight you more the less you know. After all, this is time travel we’re talking about.

The experience begins in the offices of Riditure & Co. where we were hot on the trail of it’s two missing founders. This room acts as the introductory space, giving a small taste of what is to come. The main portion of the escape room experience centres (quite literally) around a time machine, and so our first main task was to gain access to this device. From within the time machine you can travel in space and time – but only one way: Back. Then, within each location, a whole new space to explore, and a central task clearly signposted.

Hopefully it’ll be no surprise that this is a multi-room experience. But what might be less obvious from the room’s general marketing however is quite how delightfully fun it is to travel between the many rooms and each time emerge into a new space ready to explore. Everything about the experience was brilliant. The soundscape, the sets, the puzzle flow, the theming, the story, and of course time travel.

A big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff

One of my favourite things about Pushed For Time were the puzzles. It’s tricky to say but after playing 400+ escape rooms, I counted several that I’d never, ever seen before in another physical escape room game. Much more than that, they all worked so well here. Each puzzle we encountered was tactile, phyiscal and utterly satisfying to solve. In our particular group, there were so many moments where we slowed down just so that everyone could see what the puzzle solve was.

There’s a mix of padlocks and maglocks, of technological puzzles with mechanical puzzles, giving the whole thing a sense of good balance. Sometimes the puzzles integrated into the narrative a little better than others – for example, solving something to do a specific thing. Other times, it was a little harder to explain how a specific item or puzzle related to the overall plot, but in the moment we were having too much fun to worry too much about the detail. A good position to be in.

My second favourite thing about Pushed For Time is a little harder to quantify and that’s simply how much fun it is. The escape room has one central ‘gimmick’. I won’t say exactly what it is, but I will say that it was the one thing we couldn’t stop talking about after. I like rooms that make you smile and laugh, and this one does a great job.

If I had just one bit of improvement it’d probably be the “general” decor. At the time of writing this room is fairly new, and there were a few moments the immersion was broken by an undisguised look “behind the curtain”. The limitations of the physical space of Rich Mix mean the team don’t have quite as much leeway to decorate, and whilst the other escape rooms at Escape Plan are very well decorated, I have a sneaky suspicion that the worn wooden textures and dirt floors of a WW2 setting is a little bit more straightforward than most other themes!

To be sure, none of this detracted from the gameplay, its just a small detail I expect will be improved over time as the team continue to update the room over time. This “general” decor is also balanced out with one or two “specific” pieces of decor which were absolutely *chefs kiss* in terms of decor. The first was a gorgeous hand-painted mural in one of the rooms. The second was the pièce de résistance of Pushed For Time, the time machine itself, for which no expense was spared in the slightest. What can I say, I’m a big fan of wooden, art deco spaces with soft coloured lighting, and if I could get the team to come build me a replica in my apartment I don’t think I’d ever leave.

Image (c) Escape Plan

Pushed For Time: The Verdict

Overall, this is a really stand-out escape room experience. I’ve always been impressed with Escape Plan, and they’re usually the first company I recommend to visitors in London, but this time I felt like they really outdid themselves in making an escape room experience both serious and challenging and utterly fun and silly.

For me, the thing it did best were the puzzles – and for that reason I’d love to award it the Puzzle Prize badge, one of the badges we give to those escape rooms and experiences that really impress in terms of puzzling.

Pushed For Time has solidified itself in my mind as being one of the UK’s “must play” games, and I can’t be the only one. It currently sits in the top 10 on Escape the Review and with TERPECA season just around the corner I have a sneaky suspicion we might see the new room make an appearance.

Above all, Escape Plan is just such a nice company of nice people, and if that’s not a reason to go check out their games then I don’t know what is.

Pushed For Time can be booked by heading to Escape Plan’s website here. Please note, we were not charged for our experience but this has not affected our review.