Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein: The Shallows | Review

The Shallows Review | You’ve gained unauthorised access to The Shallows only to discover the conspiracy rumours are a great deal worse than ever imagined. You have 1 hour to uncover the truth, save yourself and possibly, humanity itself…

Date Played: March 2024
Time Taken: ~40 minutes
Number of Players: 4
Difficulty: Easy-Medium

Opened in September 2023, The Shallows is the newest escape room at Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein in Bath. Now I think it’s really cool that in the recent few years, museums all around the country have been opening up escape rooms (see these reviews we did for the escape rooms at the National Justice Museum, and Natural History Museum). The two concepts really do go hand in hand – you have this fantastic physical space, and want to invite people to engage with the history in a different way? Create an escape room!

On a sunny Sunday morning in Bath myself, my co-writer Georgie, and a group of our friends decided to try out three of the escape room experiences located at Mary Shelley’s House of Frankeinstein back to back. Starting with Victor’s Lair, we then tried out one of their tabletop games, The Body in the Suitcase in the Bloody Mary Bar on site, before ending our way with a trip to the basement for *dun dun dun* the Shallows.

Of the three experiences, we had a mixed opinion on which was our favourite. But one thing is for sure, the Shallows is certainly the most interesting, and I’m really excited to explain why. For starters, it has one of the more impressive ‘introductions’ I’ve seen in an escape room, it’s environment is utterly immersive due to the pre-existing design of the room, and its games mastering style was a lot more hands off than the other we played at the same venue.

As always, we’ll avoid spoilers for anything in the room that isn’t readily available in their marketing materials! Without further ado, onto the review…

Photo (c) Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein

About The Shallows and House of Frankenstein

The Shallows is located in the basement of Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein – a space normally reserved for the museum’s “horror walkthrough”. Tucked away in one corner in what used to be (and sometimes still is) part of the horror walkthrough, the team have sectioned off a space for the escape room.

In our experience we were taken down to the basement down a very creepy set of stairs into a space with flickering lighting, cold stone walls, and the eerie screams of the ambient ‘horror noise’. We were given a walkie-talkie, and told we’d otherwise be alone down here. The Games Master (the fantastic James, by the way – his real name, not character name) then popped his head in to see if we needed help. Sometimes he’d appear without a single noise, leading to some delightful “is that a shadow or is that James dressed like a Victorian lurking in the corner” moments.

That The Shallows is located in this space means it’s fairly portable. In theory there’s almost nothing that couldn’t be played in a different room. Think locked boxes, laminated sheets, locked gates, and hidden items. Things you could pack up and hide in… Another room for example. But for me what made this room so cool was just that… The room. It’s incredibly immersive to be in this space spattered with fake blood, under flickering lights, rummaging around in strange hidey-holes whilst staring a realistic skeleton in the face. The horror experience is done well, and the team have done a good job reusing the space for something different.

It’s also the reason the Games Master can be fairly hands off. There’s nothing electronic to trigger, and the ambient music serves the entire floor (including the horror walk) so it just plays on it’s own loop separate to what you’re doing in the room.

Sinking Deeper Into the Shallows

In terms of story, The Shallows tasks you with saving humanity… So no pressure, hey! Hidden somewhere within the room were a series of documents we needed to find and hand to our Games Master at the end in order to ‘succeed’. Honestly, the story was a little loose – or perhaps we just didn’t pay quite enough attention. We were far too eager to get started on the escape room once we spotted the really quite brilliant opening space.

In terms of puzzles, this game is linear. Solve one puzzle to open the lock for the next one, and so on. It’s fairly well signposted with everything you need being available near the puzzle to solve. Similarly, we didn’t get stuck at any point apart from missing one lock fairly early in the game and trying to put the correct code in the wrong place.

The puzzle mechanics are fairly “gen 1” meaning this game does revolve around finding codes and putting the codes in in order to find the puzzle for the next code or lock. There were some really fun physical moments, and plenty to look at. A few moments might have suffered from low-lightness, but we had a torch between us and – given the linearity of the experience – we all worked on each puzzle together, meaning the torch was plenty for what we were looking at.

Accessibility and Content Notes

As a note on accessibility and our recommended audience since this room is located in a basement, it is not wheelchair accessible, and does have some physical requirements including crawling. Some areas of this room are very low lit and will need a torch. However there were no audio-puzzles, and nothing that relied on colour. So it may well be accessible in other ways.

It’s a small room, so the maximum team size is 4, and we reckon you’d be fine with any group size between 2 – 4. There isn’t always enough space for everyone to be involved in all the puzzles, so 2 is probably ideal, but the space technically fits 4 and worked well for us at this size. Last but not least, whilst it is a horror room, there were no jump scares other than the creepy ambient music changing dramatically from time to time. Although, jumpscares aside, this may not be the room for you if you struggle with claustrophobia. Generally speaking, this wouldn’t be suitable for anyone under the age of 12 due to the theme.

The Verdict

Despite the mixed reception the first room, Victor’s Lair received (at least among escape room enthusiasts), I have to say I really enjoyed The Shallows. Being the third escape room back to back is always a tough gig as energies flag, but The Shallows had some really delightful moments propped up by a satisfying puzzle sequence. I haven’t played any other rooms in Bath personally, but of my co-puzzlers, they all agreed that the rooms we played at Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein were their favourites in the town.

If I had to offer any constructive feedback it’s that the story didn’t entirely stick with us, and in one or two moments were were too many of us crowded around the one thing. But I like to take that with a pinch of salt, since Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein aren’t escape room designers, they’re a museum. That considered, they’ve done really well to design a room this good!

Speaking of the museum, with any escape room booking you also gain access to the museum, which is a really lovely bonus making it well worth the price of the ticket. We ended up spending an hour or so exploring the museum between our escape rooms but I easily could have spent longer in there. Especially after I found the Frankenstein-themed pinball machine. My friends had to drag me away from that machine else we’d be late for our escape room, oops!

If you’d like to play The Shallows, you can check it out on Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein here.

Note: We weren’t charged for our experience, but we have not let this affect the contents of this review.