This wouldn't normally be my idea of fun: locked into a soulless, windowless chamber deep in the bowels of the Beurs de Berlage on a sunny Sunday. But it turned into the best hour of entertainment I've had in a long time.
The Amsterdam version of 'Sherlocked' (clearly capitalising on the success of its BBC namesake) is an escape room atmospherically furnished in vintage Holmes style, in which a series of clues and keys are concealed. These need to be used in sequence to enable your group to escape from the room within an hour, while the minutes tick by worryingly fast in oversized font on a specially adapted iPad. The emphasis is on teamwork – it's vital to keep communicating with one another as you find things – and certainly in our group of six each one of us had a small victory that contributed to our ultimate escape.
Without giving the game away, the sparsely furnished room revealed some truly innovative and unexpected effects, producing regular gasps of delight and surprise. The sense of success when we finally unlocked the door was palpable and all of us want to try another escape room somewhere else (once you've solved the mystery once there's no point going back unless and until the clues are changed), and introduce more friends to Sherlocked in Amsterdam.
In the meantime, we'll be checking out www.escapistsociety.com for more escapology fixes...
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