Pudding Lane

This is a review of the Escape Room “Pudding Lane” offered by TimeTrap Escape Room in Reading, UK.
  • ⭐️ 8/10
  • 🌡 Medium
  • ⏳ 60 Minutes
  • 👥 2 – 6 Person

London’s burning, London’s burning! Fetch the engines, fetch the engines! Fire, fire, fire, fire!

London has been in flames for two days and the city is in complete chaos, but whodunnit? Rumours are endless about who started the fire … It must have been the Catholics! No, surely the Dutch are the culprits … or are they?

The game is set in 1666, during The Great Fire of London and you are tasked with finding out who started the fire. You are not easily fooled, and obviously you would never accuse an innocent person so your goal is to find the real arsonist and deliver his/her confession through the door of the church.

The story starts off from Mincing Lane, an absolutely gorgeous and carefully designed room. The Tudor shop fronts and cobbled street flies you back right to 17th Century London. The room is filled with smoke and flickering orange light (careful if you are sensitive to this sort of thing) to fully immerse you into the storyline.

The room is full of smaller puzzles that you can either solve together as a team or simultaneously, the game is not strictly linear. The puzzles vary from logic to skill-based ones, so some of them could be enjoyable for a younger audience too. There is a fair number of items that you have to find in the room, some of them you have to scoop up from wooden surfaces (careful with splinters, I managed to stab myself under my nail after 2 minutes spent in the room!).

The second location is a family home. The attention to details of the décor here too is amazing down to the smallest items of the room. There is a nice variety of puzzles, that again can be solved simultaneously, and on occasions co-working with teammates. The puzzles aren’t particularly challenging, but they can get tricky, and at times you have to trace back to some of your earlier steps. There is some climbing involved that really adds to the fun, but it can be helpful to have an athletic member in the party.

I absolutely loved this room, and I think my teammates did too. It might be a bit on the easy side for veteran escapers, but even just for the atmosphere it would be worth a visit. It is a very hands-on game where you have to interact a lot with the items around you, so in my view it is fun for all ages.

Reka Komoli

Reka Komoli

Full time photographer, part-time escaper. Fully dragged into the world of (live avatar) Escape Rooms during pandemics, currently on a mission to play through the escape rooms available in the U.K. in person.