Hello everyone! 🙂

Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!

Last year in November, my Mum and I tackled the ‘Doctor Who’ Escape Hunt game called ‘A Dalek Awakens’ in Cheltenham. Last weekend, I had another go at tackling ‘A Dalek Awakens’ in Cheltenham and my best mate from school Stephen joined me. We greatly enjoyed doing the game!

Because I was already familiar with ‘A Dalek Awakens’, I was able to help Stephen, who hadn’t done an Escape Hunt game like this before, with knowing what to expect in terms of tackling the puzzles featured throughout. It was challenging and sadly, we didn’t achieve everything in the game in time.

But I could tell Stephen was getting into the puzzle-solving and he was able to solve some the puzzles far better than I did. This included the planet sample part of the game where we had to put in a sequence of plants in order to release another larger plant before we inserted it into an air duct.

We also did more beyond what my Mum and I did last time, as after we connected the power nodes on a grid using gloves, we inserted a cannister into a box before moving onto the next task. We got about four out of five objectives achieved in the game. It was far more than what my Mum and I did.

I should also point out that Stephen did the ‘linking the power nodes’ part of the game better than I did. For some reason, it wasn’t working for me with the gloves. I think, no matter how many times you do ‘A Dalek Awakens’, it can still be challenging to solve the puzzles in the hour slot permitted. 😐

There was the occasion where we struggled with fitting in four out of six power cores behind a wall. Even Stephen found this a challenge to do, as he managed to insert three out of four of the power cores into their slots, but couldn’t do it for the final one. It was incredibly tough for us to work out. 😐

The final straw came when we had to work out what the ‘navigating the craft through space’ part was about. Perhaps it would’ve been better if there were more than two of us and we had used the keys given to us before entering the game, but it was still challenging and we soon ran out of time. 😦

From the previous occasion with my Mum, we were given feedback on what we had done wrong with the game. For this occasion with me and Stephen, we weren’t given any feedback, which is a shame, as I would’ve liked to have known what we did wrong with the navigational part of the game.

Maybe we if we did the game earlier at 11 o’clock in the morning instead of 2 o’clock in the afternoon, we could have been given that feedback. There were a lot of people attending the Escape Hunt room games in Cheltenham that Saturday. Perhaps the staff didn’t have time to give feedback.

Also, we had a different gamemaster at the end of our ‘A Dalek Awakens’ experience compared to the one who welcomed us and gave instructions before we went in. At least, we were given a fez to wear in the Escape Hunt game. My Mum and I weren’t given a fez when we did the game in 2023. 😀

Stephen and I enjoyed a meal at the Prezzo restaurant nearby. I had a lasagne and chips whilst Stephen had a chicken salad. 😀 We talked about how much we enjoyed doing ‘A Dalek Awakens’ in Cheltenham just then. There’s no denying the second time doing the game was better than the first time for me. 🙂

I don’t know if I will do ‘A Dalek Awakens’ a third time in Cheltenham. The Escape Hunt game is very challenging no matter how many times you play it. But I would recommend trying it out should you visit Cheltenham, Reading, Birmingham, Norwich and London, since it can be quite a lot of fun. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Bye for now!

Tim 🙂