Escape Stirling: McRaven’s Revenge | Review

McRaven’s Revenge Review | Attacked by a rival pirate crew, Captain McRaven has been lost in battle, and you and your crew are locked in the brig of your ship. Your rivals have stolen McRaven’s treasure map and left you searching for riches. Unbeknownst to them, the map is a fake, and your trusty Captain has left you real clues on board to escape the brig and find the hidden treasure!

Date Played: June 2025
Time Taken: 49:45 minutes
Players: 3
Difficulty: Medium

All photos in this article are (c) Escape Stirling.

Long time readers will know I’m not the biggest fan in the world of the “Escape” franchise. As with most escape room chains, they’re fine, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them to enthusiasts. But hey! I love to be proven wrong, and that’s part of the reason why I’ve been so excitedly following the developers of McRaven’s Revenge, the new Escape Stirling room, so closely on social media. From seeing a cool stained glass window being painted, to getting some sneaky pirate shots from behind the scenes – I was excited!

Stirling is located just under an hour from Edinburgh, making it well within the distance bubble of “convenient to Edinburgh”, if anyone finds themself in the capital with time for one extra room to play. It has two sites, one on Murray Place and the other in the Stirling Arcade. Both a stone’s throw from the train station. At the time of writing, there are 5 escape rooms available with another one coming later this year. McRaven’s Revenge is located in the Stirling Arcade site. It does appear to have a lobby space in case you arrive early, but at the time we visited another room was under construction and so we went quickly into the room.

Technically speaking, McRaven’s Revenge is actually Escape the Seven Seas: McRaven’s Revenge. But don’t let the title put you off, since I’ve played Escape the Seven Seas at Escape London and I can confirm this one is pretty much entirely different in every way except for the vaguely similar pirate theme and story. In this escape room you’ll be locked in the brig of your ship after being boarded by a rival group. These rivals stole the treasure map and left you presumably for dead. But thankfully, the map quickly turns out to be a fake and so it’s up to you to figure out where the real treasure is, and how to get into it.

What follows is a fairly classic pirate themed escape room. Wooden floors walls and ceilings, curious little locked boxes, cannon balls, and large barrels. Besides the brig itself, it’s a fairly large escape room by UK standards too, having at least three distinct gameplay areas each with their puzzles which make good use of the space.

In terms of those types of puzzles we encountered, there was a varied mix. A few I’d seen before at other rooms, and a few which felt original. There were even things I spotted which I thought would be a puzzle and turned out not to be – probably to the annoyance of our GM as I took decorative things away from their correct position and “laid them out” ready for the puzzle that wasn’t – haha. Overall the room was fairly linear, and as a team of three we got stuck a few times on a few points which made for a few chokepoints of the three of us standing around scratching our heads. One more mechanic puzzle proved particularly difficult, but so it goes. But for every tricky puzzle, there was another we breezed through allowing us to finish the whole room fairly fast.

Speaking of our GM, we were hosted by the fantastic Deb who you might actually recognise from a post we published four whole years ago (good lord time flies). Deb excellently balanced stepping back as a host and offering sparing nudges when needed to help us through the room. I really loved interacting with our host, and I got the impression there are a lot of good vibes and good energies from the Games Masters at Escape Stirling, which is always nice.

One of my favourite touches about the room goes back to the team that designed it – this book has got buckets of love, and as you go through the room you’ll spot wanted posters of various pirates featuring who I can only presume to be the Games Masters in fancy dress. There’s a particularly fun moment of “oh hey, look this was our GM” *pause* “...Oh no wait, this is pirate captain so and so, I must be mistaken haha, silly me“. However this moment of charm loses a few points in my book for containing AI art in lieu of having more photos of Games Masters. On the one hand I understand needing some of the pirate posters to “stand out” as captains, on the other, we should always be supporting human-created work over AI nonsense, even if the human-created stuff is quirky and imperfect.

In all, McRaven’s Revenge doesn’t fundamentally break the mold in any way but it’s got a lovely set and buckets of charm. If you want a classic pirate room, then you can’t do much better than this! Some puzzles were great, some didn’t click with us quite as well, but between the three of us there was plenty to do and plenty of a-ha moments that led up to a mechanically fun and delightful ending.

I’d recommend this room to folks who might not have played a huge amount of escape rooms before but still want a fun challenge with plenty of different types of puzzles to sink your teeth into. In particular, if you do play – give your Games Master a little extra love from us!

If you’d like to play McRaven’s Revenge, it can be booked by heading to Escape Stirling’s website here.

Please note, we weren’t charged for our escape room but this hasn’t affected the contents of our review whatsoever.