Searching for Lady Chastity’s Reserve with Handmade Mysteries *

*I was very kindly invited to play with friends courtesy of Handmade Mysteries. However, as always, all opinions are entirely my own.

I love a trip to The Hope in Farringdon, I love catching up with friends and I love an Escape Room, so it’s pretty darn awesome when all three things come together and that’s exactly what happened when ‘Sleeping on Rocks’, our fake band, met up at the end of November.

We met at The Hope for 6.30pm and filled ourselves to the brim with a mix of meat, veggie and vegan pies with mash, smokey beans and gravy. We had a round or two of beers and at 9pm on the dot, we were greeted by Gabriel, our host for the evening.

We were guided up the stairs, to where our Handmade Mysteries Escape Room, would begin. We had an hour to hunt every clue we could to save the last bottle of Lady Chastity’s Reserve in a spooky, darkened room. You could say that my nervous disposition was not quite ready for the quest and I let out a few more screams than I should admit to.

But to fill you in on the backstory as I’m obviously not going to tell you the clues; Lady Chastity owned a vineyard that was famed for hosted lavish swanky banquets lubricated by her aphrodisiac wine and one day the vineyard was mysteriously set ablaze! What a travesty… but we were the chosen ones to find that last bottle but did we come through?!

Of course, we bloody did with just over a minute to spare! We had the famous Lady Chastity’s Reserve in our own hands!

We crawled, we searched, I screamed, we laughed, we struggled, I screamed some more and we sought out every clue we could find. We did have to ask Gabriel for some help towards the end as we had a pile of clues that we knew were the codes we needed but we just didn’t know which order in which to approach them as we were all so eager to unlock the wine!

Our host, Gabriel, was really good. She set the scene perfectly, helped us when we needed it and was so happy when we found the Reserve with time to spare! There had been many failures before us, so it must have been such a relief for her that someone pulled through and she no longer had to guard the wine!

We had such a great night and we cracked open our winnings as soon as we got back downstairs. I mean, the wine wasn’t the best we had ever drunk but had worked hard for it, that’s for sure, so we savoured every drop we took.

We went out into the darkness, bid our goodbyes, and have promised to play the other Handmade Mysteries that are on offer as we loved every minute as the room so well thought out, had such attention to detail and was very well executed.