Here’s comes the sun 😎
Location: London, England
Date Played: July 6, 2023
Team Size: 2-8; we recommend 2-4
Duration: 2-3 hours
Price: £20 per player
Ticketing: Private
Accessibility Consideration: All players must be able to navigate a few kilometers around central London, on mostly flat terrain. One street is a bit steep and uneven, but the game provides an alternative route.
REA Reaction
clueQuest’s Glitch Hunters was a well-crafted outdoor escape game around Central London, contained fully within a slick web app. This game is truly playable on demand: there’s no need to pick up any physical components, and the route is fully outdoors and on public property that’s reasonably safe to traverse by day or night. With such a lower barrier to entry, Glitch Hunters would equally make a solid introduction to escape room-esque games for families or newer players, as well as an enjoyable way to combine sightseeing with light puzzling for visiting escape room enthusiasts.
Glitch Hunters was clearly set within the integrated clueQuest universe, and I enjoyed callbacks to the characters, entities, and whimsical acronyms from clueQuest’s physical and print-and-play escape missions. The game’s illustrations and animations were delightful, and answer submission interfaces were varied, visual, and creatively themed.
I’m broadly wary of site-specific escape games that are fully app-based; many such games feel overly simplistic, or require solvers to just collect random words and numbers from signs or exhibits. Yet with Glitch Hunters, clueQuest managed to design gameplay that both felt like an escape room and prompted satisfying environmental ahas. The game’s core premise — that the world around us was full of “glitches” where what we saw differed in small ways from true reality — was a clever excuse to get players to observe their surroundings with an eye for detail.
Glitch Hunters wasn’t necessarily the most ambitious or novel outdoor escape room, yet it accomplished exactly what it was trying to achieve. If you are visiting London and have a few hours to explore a cool neighborhood, I recommend checking out Glitch Hunters.
Who is this for?
- Tourists and locals who want to explore their city through a new lens
- Any experience level
Why play?
- Accessible site-specific puzzles
- clueQuest’s distinctive characters and illustrations
- To increase your step count
Story
We are surrounded by glitches in reality, often designed to mask nefarious plots. We were sent to investigate the most recent set of glitches, figure out what was really going on, and maybe even save the world.
Setting
Glitch Hunters took place in an architecturally diverse neighborhood in central London. Through the gameplay, we were led into an alternate reality where buildings, sculptures, and signage took on new meanings.
Gameplay
clueQuest’s Glitch Hunters was an outdoor escape game with a low level of difficulty. Using a web app, the game guided us on a walking route around central London. This website was custom designed by clueQuest and was similar in general structure and functionality to what used in their print-and-play games.
Gameplay includes searching, spot-the-difference style puzzling, and making connections.
Analysis
➕ Glitch Hunters served as our escape room tour guide of a neat area filled with interesting architecture. The route was well planned, and in-game instructions were consistently clear. We occasionally supplemented our navigation with a maps app, but this was never actually required.
➕ Glitch Hunters revolved around a mobile app, and this app worked reliably for all players on our team. When any player submitted a correct answer, this progress was reflected for everyone on the team. Answer submission took multiple forms, from submitting words and phrases to interacting with graphics. For a game themed around glitches, we were grateful we never encountered any glitches where they weren’t supposed to be.
➕/➖ The puzzles were simple but generally effective. Most were structured around a similar style of environmental aha: realizing how some abstract illustration matched something in our surroundings, and then either gathering some data or finding where the two differed. Generally, this style felt clever and satisfying; at times, it started to feel a bit repetitive, as if we were solving the same puzzle over and over again.
➕ The game was well structured, mixing some sequences of parallel mini-puzzles into otherwise sequential gameplay.
➕ Though there was an ongoing timer in the app, I appreciated the ability to easily pause and resume at any time. I had to run off to another escape room when only a few puzzles from the end of Glitch Hunters, but I was able to pick it up right after.
➕ Lacking the ability to physically add to the environment, it can be hard to make a satisfying finale for outdoor escape room. Glitch Hunters solved for this by rewarding us with an iconic photo op.
Tips For Visiting
- Glitch Hunters can be played at your own pace, at any time. While there is a timer in the app, there’s no time cutoff or fail state. It’s easy to pause your game at any point, with no penalty, and resume later.
- Bring fully charged phones and battery packs. This game revolves entirely around a web app. Internet access is required.
- The game starts and ends close to central Tube stops.
Book your session with clueQuest’s Glitch Hunters, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.
Disclosure: clueQuest comped our tickets for this game.
