Hidden City: A London Adventure
It’s become a bit of tradition between the two of us to plan an adventure of some sort for each other’s birthdays, usually, this is a trip to a musical. For Claire’s twenty-first, we thought we’d change it up a bit. After having done and loved some of the escape rooms in our local area we thought we’d look further afield. Whilst googling escape rooms in London, we came across many lists that highly recommended Hidden City.
Hidden City is not your average escape room, it’s a city-wide scavenger hunt. There are escape room elements involved, having to look at the surroundings to answer clues. The games use hidden gems of London, the tourist attractions that aren’t the most obvious destinations. This made it more exciting as we ventured into bits of London that we thought we knew better than we did. The entire game is conducted through a series of texts.
We chose to do the Hunt for the Cheshire Cat and to start with, as you can see, we struggled to get in contact with the Mr Cheshire Cat. The two of us are with the same provider which meant that if there was no signal for one, the other couldn’t receive the texts either. The Hunt for the Cheshire Cat is an immersive game and requires you to talk to various people in different locations; that was not something we were looking forward to. However, once we got over the mortification of potentially getting the wrong person and saying something really strange to them, it was a lot of fun.
We knew the starting point was the National Portrait Gallery and so we made our way there after some lunch. We loitered outside the entrance for quite a while whilst we waited for the texts to come through before beginning the adventure inside and collecting our first clues.
We would love to be able to share with you all that we did during our adventure, but we don’t want to spoil it for anyone who might be interested. We found that some of the clues were easy, some took a bit of thinking and some were often easier than we thought (we felt a bit stupid at times). The mistakes we made meant that we did a bit more walking than we needed to, so if you’re interested, wear sensible footwear!
As a whole, the experience is a lot of fun. As for value for money, it’s cheaper than the escape rooms we have done. It feels like you are getting more for your money as the Hunt for the Cheshire Cat is at least three hours long whereas a typical escape room is only an hour. If you are looking for something to do in London, love escape rooms and want to see the parts not usually recommended by tourist sites, this is for you.
If you think that this is something that interests you visit Hidden City’s website and there is a chance for you to do a free trial which consists of a riddle from Moriarty (one of their other games is Sherlock based).
M🌸 and C🌙
