Online Escape Rooms Ireland: Spirit Seekers – The Clare Abbey | Review

You are joining paranormal investigators, “Spirit Seekers Ireland”, on their investigation of the Clare Abbey ruins in County Clare, Ireland. Your team must capture at least 4 pieces of hard evidence of paranormal activity and get this evidence to Professor O’Connor of Trinity College Dublin. It is of vital important to make this a successful mission.

Rating: Unique!
Completion Time: 34:53
Date Played: May 2021
Party Size: 4
Recommended For: Paranormal Investigators

I’m calling it, Spirit Seekers: The Clare Abbey is the first of it’s kind…

*pauses waiting for an onslaught of DMs telling me I’m wrong*

…But seriously, let me explain the concept: The Clare Abbey is a real life location in Ennis, Ireland that has been converted into a virtual escape room experience. You play a team of ghost hunters and you must journey there to solve puzzles and… You guessed it: Catch ghosts!

The fact it makes use of a real life location that isn’t an escape room is huge to me. What’s to stop someone taking some 360 photos of the Eiffel Tower and making an escape room there (OK maybe the Council of Paris would have words, but you get the idea). It’s really, really unique and I love that the creators put the time and effort in to make this game.

It’s also great fun to play with Escaping the Closet as part of the 40th Escape Game Olympics! Bring on the leaderboards!

The Story

The Clare Abbey is packed with ghosts, and it’s your job to prove it! You’ve been sent by Professor O’Connor of Trinity College Dublin and are armed with all the usual spirit-catching equipment you need. You know, typical ghost catching stuff. We had an EMP thingy-ma-jig, heat reader, we had a spirit box, we had a camera, and so on.

The best part about this game is that it’s also just “Episode One” meaning there’s plenty more to come from Online Escape Rooms Ireland and frankly… I can’t wait! Give me some more ghosts to hunt any day!

The Experience

Spirit Seekers: The Clare Abbey is played in a platform called Telescape. This means you have a 360 degree view of the area and can point and click into any item or object to take a closer look. Unlike most Telescape games, there isn’t just one space to explore… But 16!! Each of those 16 locations is it’s own photosphere with it’s own mysteries to uncover.

There’s about one to three puzzles per ‘area’ meaning there’s still plenty to do. But it does give the game a feeling of being immensely big, and very easy to get lost in. The majority of the time spent in this game was probably searching for something we’d spotted earlier but couldn’t remember where exactly it was! Oops!

Note to other puzzlers: Make notes of what you find and where!

The game unfolds fairly linearly in that you need to first capture a ghost in one particular way, then the other, and so on. This means that when you first open up the game you’ll be spotting ghosts out the corner of your eyes everywhere! This was one of the most fun parts of the game and genuinely chilled me at points. Creepy sightings and eerie noises. *shudders*

All things considered, the graphics are really cool and a step up from the previous two Online Escape Rooms Ireland games I’ve played: Beach Bar and O’Brien’s Cottage. Cameras crackling and the haziness of ghost sightings felt immersive and engaging. On the completion of each puzzle, a video prompts showcasing the ‘what happened when you did this thing’.

The Puzzles

In terms of puzzles, the creators have been very clever making use of the environment and not adding too many things which feel out of place. Of course, some things have been added – like additional plaques, or 4 digit codes locking things away, but largely the game uses what the Clare Abbey provides. For example a relief in the wall you’ll place an object you find later, a strange etching already found on a grave, the crow caws, or strange puddles and sundials.

Even though your goal is different (capture evidence of ghosts), the puzzles are fairly typical of what you’d find in a real escape room. There are plenty of locks to unlock, including digits, and so on. In most cases, you had to combine items at the right time to achieve a desired outcome.

As the area is so vast, in our team of four I think there are definitely some puzzles I didn’t get to solve as other team mates finished them quite quickly – but vice versa on the things I spotted earlier on. This means this game would be best tackled by splitting up and looking for clues.

We got stuck a couple of times, but largely this was due to not remembering where something was, or missing a small detail in one of the many areas – wasting time searching through the other 15 areas before returning to the place you’re supposed to be!

Overall

This game reminds me a lot of a Halloween party I once threw, where all the attendees were split into teams of ‘TV Ghost Hunters’ and their goal was to complete escape room style challenges in this outdoor area whilst trying to capture the best footage of a ghost in order to keep their TV ratings up.

It had the same light-hearted yet spooky vibes and has inspired me to throw another future party maybe in the vicinity of a church. They are very creepy in the dark, after all!

I’ve marked this game here on The Escape Roomer as ‘good for Halloween’, and even though it’s set in the day time I stand by that. This would be an excellent game to tackle this October or November on a cold and dark evening from home. Driven by narrative and puzzles that aren’t too challenging makes this for me, a big hit with families too!

Props to the creators for making such a special game!

Spirit Seekers: The Clare Abbey can be booked for 24 EUROS on Online Escape Room Ireland’s website here.

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