The Panic Room: Dead Man’s Chest | Review

While adventuring across the seven seas looking for treasure, you spot a ship adrift on the horizon.  It appears empty, not a soul in sight…

You decide to board this ghostly ship, and upon exploring the captain’s cabin you stumble across a strange chest, emanating a strange and mysterious feel. You reach out to it, and as your fingers move across the rusting steel, a voice bellows from the ether. 

It is the spirit of the captain himself! 

His disembodied voice tells of his discovery of an Aztec ruin, laden with gold. Yet, an even bigger treasure laid within: A totem of immortality. A totem he claimed to himself hastily, hiding the valuable icon from his crew in a chest only he could open. 

Yet, The totem was not all that it seemed, the captain passed away and awoke inside the chest itself. The totem was cursed! 

You now need to help the pirate by solving all of the exciting puzzles within the chest, breaking the curse and set him free.
Are you up for the challenge?

Date Played: 28th December 2021
Time Taken: 30 minutes
Number of Players: 2
Difficulty: Easyish

All aboard the Ti-Panic…!

Back in summer 2021 (which is now LAST YEAR – when on earth did that happen?!), we won an Instagram competition to help name The Panic Room’s new pirate ship for their upcoming experience: Dead Man’s Chest.

As we are not often down south, we booked in (optimistically) for winter 2021 when we would be travelling down to Ash’s family in Kent. Luckily, the stars aligned and we managed to make it down south without getting infected (never thought we would cheers to a negative lateral flow test but COVID has taught us lots of new things about ourselves!).

So, we got to have a go at this new adventure which takes place inside the Panic Room’s sister shop – Don’t Panic, and we are so happy we finally got to play this escape game!

It’s only one box… Right?!

This adventure steers away from the typical escape experience as players are tasked with breaking into a cursed treasure chest, rather than escaping from a room. We initially thought, ‘this surely won’t take us long at all!’, but wow, we were pleasantly surprised by just how much The Panic Room have managed to squeeze into one (pretty big) box!

There were layers and layers of puzzles with drawers appearing from literally nowhere and secret compartments galore. On more than one occasion, a drawer appeared from somewhere that we did not expect and offered up a whole new section of gameplay. It’s a box full of different puzzles and gentle nudges in the right direction.

From moment to moment we found it fairly easy to figure out what we needed to work on next, but this just goes to show how well The Panic Room have signposted the experience… Especially when you’ve only got one treasure chest to work with!

Aye-Aye Captain!

Obviously, this is quite a linear experience as players are solving one section of the chest at a time, but we really enjoyed tackling this game as a pair. With the help of our spooky pirate ghost man, we worked through all the puzzles together and navigated the mechanics of the game seamlessly. The technology worked wonderfully to provide us with a magical experience of breaking into the treasure chest.

A note on the clue system, as we did get stuck on a couple of occasions and needed to use it. It was in theme and clues were delivered clearly and always for the right bit of the chest we were currently working on!

We would definitely recommend this game for an enthusiast pair to see how you get on. It would also work really well for a group of newbies to introduce the escape room concept (and to get you hooked!).

This cursed treasure chest!

Overall, this was a great game. We thoroughly enjoyed playing the Dead Man’s Chest and especially enjoyed getting to explore the Don’t Panic shop afterwards with a nice 10% off for escaping successfully! The shop is literally the dream for escape room enthusiasts, there are SO many games on offer and we had to resist buying everything…

We will definitely be returning to The Panic Room as soon as well can.

You can book the Dead Man’s Chest experience at The Panic Room’s website here.