About The Butcher Escape Room
The Butcher is one of three escape room challenges at Trapped Escape Rooms in Gloucester. In this particular room, the somewhat macabre scenario is that you have been abducted by a notorious cannibal serial killer, known (as the room suggests) as “The Butcher.”
You have awoken trapped in his dark basement, tired and weary and you must battle against the odds to find your way out before he comes back and makes a meal of you in 60 minutes’ time…
What We Thought of The Butcher
Handily located next to two car parks (use the multi-story it’s much cheaper) in the centre of Gloucester, are the Trapped Escape Rooms. We received a warm welcome upon arriving, and straight away we headed upstairs to receive a video safety message and an intro video to our chosen game, The Butcher.
Before entering the escape room we also posed for a green screen photograph, being told to look scared as there was a giant blade above us, but unfortunately, when we viewed it later (they deliver it to the email you give them filling out the team sheets) it seems I wasn’t correctly in frame. Maybe an X on the floor would fix this for any future pictures?
As we start the escape room proper we are thrown off guard before we’ve even begun with an unexpected twist right from the get-go, however, we take it in our stride and set to work.
This first task is tough, it’s physical as well as mental, and for a solid 5 minutes I am worried I am going to let the team down. It turns out that we made a rookie error and both thought a part of the game was just a part of the building and had we not made this daft mistake we may not have needed to use our first clue.
On the subject of clues, you can request three of these throughout the game without affecting your leaderboard candidacy. You can get further clues if you are really stuck but that will mean you forfeit any glory and won’t see your team name on the board even if you get a winning time.
The theming is bang on, it looks just like what you would expect a serial killer’s lair to. Dingy, depressing and grubby, you are immersed in The Butcher’s world from beginning to end and this ramps up the feeling of trepidation.
How Difficult is The Butcher Escape Room?
The game has some easy wins that keep the team motivation high, but where the wins in question are relatively easy, the effort and quality of the clues throughout are excellent. This isn’t a hastily cobbled-together set of puzzles, this is a carefully curated escape with some fun gory elements, and not all the puzzles are easy by any measure!
We escaped with less than 3 minutes to spare and used all 3 of our clues. It’s a challenging game, and we were told it has a 60% escape rate so we are pleased to have made it out at all!
Conclusion
The Butcher Escape Room is an excellent game with incredible use of the space at their disposal along with amazing theming and storyline providing a truly immersive experience, although this was marred slightly by hearing what we assume was another team talking outside of our room at one point. That being said I don’t know how they could reasonably stop that sound bleed in the space they have.
Without giving anything away, the first solve is pretty dependent on a team member’s physicality and stature, especially when there are only two of you playing, and although the staff did provide us with additional materials to allow us to complete it I feel there could be a way of providing that without “breaking the fourth wall”
Great staff, great theming and some challenging puzzles. If you like escape rooms you should definitely check out Trapped Escape Rooms in Gloucester.
