Review: Prison Island (London)

With 31 different challenges to take on across 90 minutes, Prison Island London is a fast-paced competitive gaming experience that's equal parts fun and frustration.

Photo: Fever

Following in the footsteps of the much-loved Crystal Maze Live Experience, which heralded the beginning of the UK's competitive gaming craze, Prison Island is London's latest interactive escape-room-style experience to focus on providing not only a huge variety of different challenges but a huge number of them too.

The experience's elevator pitch is pretty simple: Every team of between 2-5 people have 90 minutes to tackle as many or as few of Prison Island's 31 challenges as they like, in any order they like, to earn as many points as possible. Each room can take up to 3 minutes to complete, and groups are free to repeat any challenge as many times as they like, but with such a big line-up, those hoping to tackle all of them won't have much time spare for do-overs.

Each team's running score is displayed on leaderboards scattered around the venue, and at the end of the experience, teams receive a print-out of their stats with a breakdown of how long they spent in each room, how many attempts they had, and their final score. An online leaderboard also allows visitors to see how well they fared not only against those playing alongside them across that day but also across all 21 countries that are home to a version of the experience.

Photo: Fever

Prison Island's games vary hugely from room to room and test everything from balance and agility to lateral thinking skills and communication. Many of the cells contain physical challenges, which will have guests either climbing, balancing, crawling or running, but there's also a healthy number of games that require more on logical and lateral thinking and don't rely on strength or accuracy.

On the outside of each cell is a small panel, which provide information on minimum player numbers, the game's intensity and a vague one-line description that alludes to the game. While it's all useful information, a good amount of the enjoyment derived from taking part in Prison Island comes from not knowing what awaits on the other side of the cell doors.

Photo: Fever

Once inside, groups will often need to work out exactly what is required of them, as the clock is already ticking. Those who are really stuck can glean some additional information about each room's given objective by shining the small UV light they were given upon arrival on the back of the cell's door to reveal some handwritten hints, which have presumably been left behind by former inmates, but teams are otherwise on their own to work it out through trial and error.

Without wishing to spoil any of the challenges for would-be-prisoners, some of our personal highlights included Butchers Lane, which gives you a short amount of time to memorise and answer questions about the details of a crime scene; The Prison, which had us step into the shoes of Andy Dufresne and escape a prison cell on our hands and knees; and Dive, which has dozens of exercise balls filling the room and blocking a series of buttons on the walls and floor that need pressing to score points. It says a lot about our performance that across all three of these rooms, we only got the maximum points in one of them, but that's besides the point...

Photo: Fever

It'll come as little surprise that Prison Island is, of course, heavily themed to look like a prison. The show's briefing room has groups stand before a judge (one of Prison Island's staff) to await their sentencing, with flashing lights and sirens that blare when the gavel comes down; many of the experience's cells evoke the feeling of being inside a maximum security facility, containing either steel grating or head-height prison bars, and there's additional set dressing in certain rooms like electric chairs and graffiti to sell the venue's theming even further.

Outside of this theming, Prison Island also contains some impressive scenic elements, which all tie into their specific puzzles. The Docks houses several stacked-up replicas of shipping containers that tower over guests as they frantically explore the space. Shark Bay has been designed to look like an underwater climbing wall, and the cell containing Tilt messes with your sense of balance from the second you step inside, thanks to the steep gradient inside the room.

Photo: Fever

As for the difficulty level of Prison Island's 30+ challenges, it varies massively from cell to cell. While some games are self-explanatory and easy to score big points on (Basket has you throw basketballs into hoops from behind bars, and Laser Gun consists of shooting light-up targets with guns mounted to the floor), others are far more abstract and realistically would require a couple of failed attempts to master. The physical nature of some other games will likely prevent certain groups from succeeding, even if the objective is clear, with Cellblock North and Green Mile both requiring considerable effort to score even just a few points.

The replayability built into Prison Island's design lends itself particularly well to the more challenging cells, encouraging groups to retry games multiple times throughout their visit to either best their high scores or give challenges another go once they've got to grips with the objective.

While for the most part, all of the challenges on offer at Prison Island worked as intended during our visit, we did have issues in a couple of rooms that prevented us from scoring higher, and two of the cells were closed during our visit, meaning we couldn't complete everything the experience had to offer, despite spending 90 minutes there. If you visit at peak times, you may also find that most rooms are in use at times, though each game's short runtime ensures that waiting for a specific cell to become free doesn't eat into your game time too much.

Photo: Fever

While it can't match The Crystal Maze Experience in terms of immersion, Prison Island's commitment to providing an action-packed competitive gaming experience means that the 90 minutes guests get to score as many points as possible are hugely enjoyable. It's an ideal group activity for those looking to challenge themselves, and the replayability of the experience means that guests have a pretty compelling reason to return again and again.

We may have just scraped into Prison Island London's top 500 for the month, but the sky is the limit for our inevitable return...

★★★½

Total score: 866

[Tickets gifted in exchange for an honest review]

Buy tickets to Prison Island (London) here

---

Prison Island London runs at 5-7 Hornsey Street near Holloway Road. Tickets are priced from £27.90 per person. For more information and to book tickets, visit feverup.com