Story & Theming – 7/10

The story for Magic Archive does get slightly lost beforehand in the translation from German to English, however this is not the case when you are at the experience. Before entering the experience, you do get to meet a magic professor who explains why you have been brought in and what you may entail on your journey into the magical world. 

The story starts before you even enter into the experience, with you being transformed from the magic waiting room into the experience through a teleportation spell. From here, you entered into a well themed magical laboratory environment where we needed to complete a series of puzzles and find a magical artefact. Which one? We had no idea at this point but hope we would find out when solving the puzzles. 

The room had a number of props which matched the magical world and even some from the Harry Potter series, so it is worth keeping an eye out for these. These were super cool and added a lot to the experience. 

Within the story, we were told we had to avoid the professors evil matching twin, who may come snooping during our time in the office. Which certainly adds some tension to your game! 

The story does progress and makes more and more sense the more you complete. The ending does provide a lot of answers you had at the start and ultimately comes to a great conclusion with a fun twist!

Uniqueness – 9/10

The Magic Archive was one of the most unique rooms we have completed for some time. The room had many different elements and factors to it. Firstly, with it being an escape theatre experience, this already peaked our interest as it was not like your average escape room. Whilst we have seen the use of actors, introduction scenes and themed characters in rooms, the way it was pulled together at Team X provided a high quality, comedic and immersive adventure for all of our team. 

Outside of this, you had many unique puzzles in the game which we have not seen elsewhere. These having to be solved in a different way to logic and sense or thinking outside of the box, but more the power of friendship and interactivity. This was a real different way to what we were used to and was not what we expected at all, but worked flawlessly in this themed experience. 

If all of the above was not enough already, the ending was different and provided alternative endings depending on what you did. Whilst we can’t say too much without spoiling it, it added some tense, argumentative and quick decisions from our team and created a great ending in a way we also didn’t expect.