Room Escape Artist

Editor’s Note: It’s Halloween season! This seasonal experience is running for a limited time in London. If you’re looking to celebrate spooky season in North America, checkout our Halloween Recommendations Guide.

Aww, topsy!

Location: London, England

Date Played: October 7, 2026

Team Size: 2-7; we recommend 2-4

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: £38.99-42.99 per player

Ticketing: Private

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Post Mortem repurposed the set of clueQuest’s oldest escape room, PLAN52, and turned it into a spooky seasonal Halloween pop-up themed around a suspicious doctor and a string of disappearances. The experience is running for just a month, from October 5 through November 8, 2026.

clueQuest is a well-oiled team building machine, with multiple copies of each of their games. This allows them to accommodate large corporate bookings, and it also meant that they didn’t have to give up much to take one copy of PLAN52 out of commission for a month and try something new. Other business-optimized escape rooms, like The Escape Game chain in the United States, regularly reskin their existing games for seasonal events or brand collabs, and it’s great to see clueQuest similarly taking advantage of what they’ve already built to offer an entirely new game.

Small but meaningful edits made the Post Mortem setting feel different from PLAN52 – new panels on a wall, a morgue-esque cover for a box, and an obligatory murder board. In addition to these physical changes, the lighting and sound design went a long way in concocting a spooky and mildly menacing atmosphere.

I appreciated the intention behind Post Mortem, but unfortunately the positives largely ended there. While clueQuest has overall progressed as a brand, from the gleefully surreal ORIGENES to the tech-heavy puzzle playground IAMAI, the style of Post Mortem felt like a big step backwards, landing somewhere closer to the outdated style seen in the original PLAN52. We encountered a major red herring in lock mapping, a confusing bit of redundant cluing, and a randomly hidden box within an otherwise non-search-centric game. A cheap computer mouse didn’t work consistently. A lore dump in a journal was decently written to provide some character backstory, yet it was excessively long such that most players are unlikely to actually read any of it, especially in the game’s low lighting.

Post Mortem fell victim to many of the puzzle design flaws I’d have expected to see a decade or more ago. There were some decent ideas in the mix, but it all would have benefited from further editing, even if it was just a pop-up game.

Furthermore, the marketing around Post Mortem‘s intensity was perplexingly off. On their website, clueQuest describes Post Mortem as “primarily a horror experience” that offers a “harrowing, high-adrenaline challenge… where players are kept on-edge throughout.” They limit the game to ages 18+. In reality, Post Mortem was a spooky environment with low lighting, foreboding music, murderous theming with some obviously fake body parts, and a few light jump scares with an actor banging on or slamming a door. It was no more intense than your typical serial killer room, and more “adult” only in contrast to clueQuest’s usual style.

This sets the wrong expectations for all audiences. Horror enthusiasts or those who might otherwise visit a haunt with scare actors may be disappointed by the relatively low intensity of Post Mortem. Conversely, potential players who would enjoy this experience might be scared off by the advertised horror level.

Above all, Post Mortem didn’t really feel like a clueQuest game, as it largely abandoned the charmingly cartoonish humor that defines the clueQuest brand. I applaud clueQuest for converting this space and experimenting with a seasonal concept. In the future, I hope they’ll use a limited-time offering to push the envelope more – perhaps creating a Halloween pop-up that leans into the interconnectedness of the clueQuest cinematic universe and finds a way to blend in their whimsy to create a more unique spooky offering, not just an uninspired rehashing of a basic serial killer escape room.

Tips For Visiting

• Take public transportation to King’s Cross.

Book your hour with clueQuest’s Post Mortem, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: clueQuest comped our tickets for this game.