Guilty?! – A National Justice Museum Escape Room | Review

Guilty?! – A National Justice Museum Escape Room Review | It’s 1831 in Nottingham. King George IV died the previous year and King William IV is yet to be crowned, triggering the dissolving of parliament and a general election that leaves the city on the brink of riots. The Reform Bill leads to civil disturbances across the country when The House of Lords blocks a motion by parliament to give more men the vote than just nobility and landowners. You find yourself in Nottingham’s Narrowmarsh, a cramped, smelly slum rife with criminal activity. The local constable has found you at the site of a Reform Bill riot where a local pub was set ablaze. You have been accused of a crime – if found guilty, the punishment is hanging. Over the course of an hour, you and your team will move through our Grade II* listed Georgian museum, from the slums of Narrowmarsh, the exercise yard, and the gaol. Solve puzzles, and gather your evidence before deciding – will you stand trial and try to prove your innocence, or will you try to escape your fate?

Date Played: July 2024
Number of Players: 4
Time Taken: 42:32 minutes
Difficulty: Medium

There are a few escape rooms in the UK that allow you to play in particularly interesting premises. There’s the old abandoned train station at Mission Breakout in London, you can play on a boat in Dublin, or even Nottingham itself boasts a series of escape rooms in underground caves. But few are as impressive as a literal Grade II listed Georgian gaol in a real life museum after dark. Maybe I’ve been brainwashed as a kid by Ben Stiller and Robin Williams, but here’s just something so cool about being in a museum after it’s closed.

So when we heard that the National Museum of Justice was putting on a special escape room event in the summer of 2024, we were thrilled. Guilty?! – A National Justice Museum Escape Room isn’t just a cool location though. It also turned out to be a pretty impressive escape room too. Its educational and rooted in the real life history you encounter as you explore the museum. It involves lots of different areas of the museum in surprising and delightful ways. And, above all, it’s also difficult – and I say that as a compliment. We’re an experienced team but there were moments I wasn’t sure we’d actually escape in time.

But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself! Let’s start at the beginning.

(above photo is (c) the National Justice Museum)

How does Guilty?! work?

We arrived 10 minutes before our allocated start time. We might have been even earlier, but some well placed Geocaches in the surrounding area allowed us a little pre-game puzzle warm up. From there we were met by Amy, one of the employees of the museum so we could use the bathroom and lock up our bags, then whisked off to the start location for the briefing.

For the entirety of the experience you’ll be joined by an in-room games master. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d feel about that at first. After all, I’m an awkward puzzle solver when someone else is watching. But by contrast, our games master’s presence ended up being one of my favourite things about the whole experience! We had Hannah D. join us and throughout the course of the experience she donned different outfits, accents, and personalities as a cast of curious characters from the Georgian era. Hannah was utterly brilliant from the first moment to the last, and she’d be very welcome in any future escape room I play (of course, costume and fun accents not withstanding).

The experience is then broken up into a number of different sections around the National Justice Museum in Nottingham. As the story progresses, so does your journey through the physical space. Whilst this physical experience is more or less the same from team to team, the experience does boast 5 unique endings which branch off from one another right before the ending.

Beyond this, we can’t really reveal too much of what happened on our specific experience but just know this – it was really fun!

Breaking out of the National Justice Museum

In terms of where this experience really shined, it was the environment. Listen, how the heck can I not rate this room 5 stars on décor? It involves the original architecture in really novel ways. I spotted things about the environment I wouldn’t ever have done if I were just visiting the museum, and I was delighted by how realistic the story felt.

In terms of puzzles, I found the experience erred on the more difficult side. Information in this game was really, really important. You had to pay attention and understand exactly who you were and what you needed to do. Reading everything in in a room isn’t usually my forte, and this room required it in bucketloads. Whilst we didn’t use any clues in the game, if it had come to it I might have used one or two on story clarifications. After all, fighting for your innocence is a hard job without a complete picture.

I also have a sneaky suspicion I accidentally brute-forced my way past a significant chunk of the puzzlier part of the escape room. We were missing a few pieces of information, but we spotted a way to solve the puzzle without them in a creative way. It felt a little bit like the game shouldn’t have allowed us to bypass this puzzle in that specific way, but I don’t fault the designers in the slightest.

To take a closer look at the story, it goes that you’ve been accused of burning down a pub and whilst you rot in prison you realise there’s a lot of evidence against you. But, as you dig deeper and solve puzzles, some of the evidence doesn’t quite line up. You begin to doubt if you really were where they said you were at the time of the blaze. Depending on how you play and which path you go down the story will be more or less important to your finale. Since we hadn’t totally followed it as closely as we might have, we decided to go for a path that involved the story less, and this worked out well for us.

Last but not least in terms of the “fun factor”, a metric I like to use to describe in simple terms how fun a room was – Guilty?! does very well. There were so many fun little moments and cool locations to explore, each time we were led to a new area I felt giddy like a kid (again, in a museum after dark).

Guilty?! The Verdict

Overall, I enjoyed playing Guilty?! a lot. Is it a perfect escape room? Absolutely not. But what it does do, it does well. It’s probably my favourite museum-escape room crossover, and everyone involved in the production should be very proud. It had such fantastic set design, brilliant acting, and a well thought out storyline to follow. We finished it in a little over 40 minutes with no clues, but had we not accidentally skipped a puzzle or two we might have been a bit longer and pushed it to 60. So bear it in mind if you decide to play!

As a final note of admin: In terms of the number of players, Guilty?! – A National Justice Museum Escape Room is for teams of 4 – 6 players. In truth, there weren’t any puzzles that required exactly 4 of us to solve, and so we think it would probably be fine to play in a smaller group… However due to the limited slots and large overhead costs I suspect the decision to run this as a 4 minimum might be to do with the cost! A team of 6 would be fine too, but 4 was the sweet spot for us.

Before or after your booking you might like to enjoy a Geocache or two, or simply chill out in one of the lovely restaurants in the area. Our particular team went for Annie’s Burger Shack since it did vegan options, just a 4 minute walk from the museum.

Guilty?! can be played at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham on select dates in 2024.

Please Note: We were not charged for our experience but this has not influenced our review.