Escape Reality Glasgow: Star Crew | Review

Star Crew Review | The SS Clementine is an old but beloved starship known for its technical problems. When the internal system fails mid-flight, the crew is forced to make an emergency crash landing on a nearby planet. Power cells have come loose during the bumpy landing, and many of the ship’s systems have been knocked offline. You are the engineering team assigned to repair the ship and save the crew – can you become the valiant Star Crew and save the day before time runs out?

Date Played: March 2024
Time Taken: 26:25
Number of Players: 4
Difficulty: Easy

So Escape Reality doesn’t have the best reputation in the world. In fact, if we’re being honest with ourselves, in terms of UK franchises it’s probably right near the bottom. Which was why I was so surprised to hear it consistently being recommended by enthusiasts around Edinburgh. “That Escape Reality? Are you sure?”, “Yeah, really.”

In fact, in the run up to our booking (during which I took team Escaping the Closet round to all of my favourite escape rooms in Edinburgh), almost every single owner and Games Master we encountered confirmed that the new rooms at Escape Reality Glasgow were fantastic and not to be missed.

So, what changed? Well, word on the street… Or rather, word in the *abstract sense* escape room lobby, is that Escape Reality Glasgow has a manager and game designer by the name of Fran who was given free reign on a couple of rooms including Conspiracy and now, Star Crew. With a team comprised of Fran, Chris, Richard, and I assume the whole suite of GMs, they’ve made some new rooms that are wholly original and packed clever set design. In fact, everything about this game screams “made with love”. From the little cat motifs everywhere *cough* in homage to the original Clementine, to the fact it’s made almost entirely out of one of a kind recycled materials. All in all, I’m impressed. A round of applause for the team.

Escape Reality as a company itself still has a few issues, sure. Its franchise model means many rooms around the country get very run down very quickly, they’re also as a business overly suited to corporate bookings and even on a game by game basis I’m still surprised when Escape Reality sites give me an iPad to ‘scan’ QR codes for clues. But for the first time in my short escape room life, I’m really pleased to be able to wholeheartedly recommend an escape room at an Escape Reality site, and I hope the rest of the sites around the UK take note.

So lets get into it, what is Star Crew all about?

About Star Crew at Escape Reality

In Star Crew, you play a team of engineers from the SS Clementine. Your job is fairly simple: fix the spaceship. You find battery packs, reconnect them, tweak the wiring a little, and push buttons. Its in short, a very simple room. We completed it in a very quick time, and I think if I were asked to recommend this one I’d nudge a beginner or family team in it’s direction. For me however, where it really shines is the set design.

I’ve mentioned already that there’s a lot of recycled material, but somehow you don’t notice all that. You instead see what the designers wanted you to, a spaceship. There’s amazing things glued to the side of this ship and painted red – from half a kayak, to bits of the insides of what I guess are computers? It’s hard to know, the whole thing is just so gloriously sci-fi I don’t even want to know. The SS Clementine is parked (or should I say crash landed) in a forest clearing filled with weird and wonderful plants from foreign, alien biologies. At the time of playing this game I was reading a sci fi book where a spaceship is hiding out in a jungle on a planet, so this felt like my brain fantasy come to life. Once inside the spaceship, it only got better, but I don’t want this review to stray into spoiler territory so I’ll just leave it there. Super cool set design. Super cool game.

(Since there are no photos of this room available online, you’ll have to imagine it from this sketch from the game dev diary where the creators talk about how they built the room).

Thinking about the puzzles, I have to go back to the target audience which is more “mass market” than enthusiast. What I mean by this is that they did err on the easier side. There were plenty of ‘search and find’ puzzles. Plenty. But I kind of enjoyed it because it meant I got to really appreciate the environment. In other cases, we had to push buttons or pick up objects and rearrange them around to “reveal” the solutions. The solutions were invariably codes. It was a fairly code heavy room, but again not necessarily a bad thing just a thing. You’re given a booklet about your spaceship to help and this booklet gently guides you through what to do in the spaceship, but beyond that you’re free to do what you like in any other. In this way, it’s a non-linear room. I saw about 50% of the puzzles, rushing around in my own little engineer outfit fixing my own little things. At some moments our team of 4 came back together to work on something together, but besides a few momentary bottlenecks we more or less worked on our own puzzles. I truly did feel like I was a character in the world embodying my role well, and that felt meaningful.

I recently gave a talk (not a self promo I promise but if you want to listen to it it’s from Day 3 of ThinkyCon) where I describe escape rooms as ‘thinky games’ beyond the screen. If this is true, then Star Crew was my sci-fi fantasy in playable real life form. There aren’t many good sci-fi rooms out there, but this is one of them.

When we played, our Games Master was Ella and despite it being a rather busy Easter weekend, she went above. In particular, I enjoyed chatting to her about the room and seeing some of the props up close after. It’s clear the team love working there, and it shows with how enthusiastic their staff have been. My only regret? Not also booking Conspiracy.

The Verdict

I really am impressed with Escape Reality and this room has immediately gone on my roster of “rooms to recommend to people when they travel to Scotland”. It’s an especially good one to take folks who have never played an escape room before, because it perfectly encapsulates what makes escape rooms so damn good. The immersive sets, the non-linear collaborative nature, the roleplay. For our particular team it was a little easy, and we felt like we finished about 30 minutes earlier than we would have wanted to do. As such, if an enthusiast did want to play, it’s maybe better to book as 2 or 3 maximum. But that aside, if you find yourself travelling out to Glasgow, put Star Crew on your list.

Star Crew can be played at Escape Reality’s Glasgow branch.