Hello everyone! 🙂
Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!
Last week, my parents and I spent a couple of days in Cheltenham from Wednesday to Friday. On Thursday, my Mum and I did the ‘Doctor Who’ Escape Hunt game called ‘A Dalek Awakens’! It was the first time we ever did a ‘Doctor Who’ Escape Hunt game, but we had great fun experiencing it! 🙂
‘A Dalek Awakens’ is a part of the ‘Time Lord Victorious’ multi-platform story that happened from 2020 to 2021. The closest I ever got to reviewing ‘A Dalek Awakens’ was when I reviewed ‘Genetics of the Daleks’, starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor – which is the prequel to ‘A Dalek Awakens’.
You don’t need to listen to ‘Genetics of the Daleks’ to get an idea of what ‘A Dalek Awakens’ is about (though Mum and I heard it beforehand to get an idea of what we were letting ourselves in for). It was intriguing to experience the Escape Hunt game compared to hearing the Big Finish audio story that lead into it.
Apparently, ‘A Dalek Awakens’ is held in places like Reading, Birmingham, Norwich and London as well as Cheltenham. It’s fortunate my parents and I stayed overnight in Cheltenham back in March 2023 for me to find out about ‘A Dalek Awakens’ so we could return in November to experience it. 🙂
Like I said, this was my first time experiencing ‘A Dalek Awakens’. My Mum and I didn’t exactly achieve everything that went on in the Escape Hunt game, though we were saved by the Doctor in the end, and we did manage to achieve 3 out of 5 objectives in order to save the spaceship Future. 🙂
In the game, you step aboard the starship called Future where a rogue Dalek (voiced by Nicholas Briggs) has tapped into the power system to recharge its weapons. Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor contacts and assigns you the mission to make the Future’s life support systems independent.
This includes oxygen, water, gravity, etc. There are five of these, but I can’t recall what the other two are. Mostly, it was a challenge trying to work out what to do when solving all these puzzles in the Escape Hunt game. Thankfully, we had the A.I. called Helix to give instructions on what we had to do.
The puzzles include attaching power cores, cross-breeding plants, mixing compatible biological samples, charging a magnetic core and navigating the craft through space. You have about an hour to complete the tasks in time. Like I said, my Mum and I did three of the five tasks, which is shame. 😦
Mum and me did the ‘Doctor Who’ Escape Hunt game ‘A Dalek Awakens’ in Cheltenham, November 2023. Had a fun time! 😀
Thankfully, we were given feedback by the game master on what we didn’t exactly do in achieving some of the tasks. She was very reassuring, saying that we had done well for our first-time experience in an Escape Hunt game. Apparently, 2 to 6 people can play ‘A Dalek Awakens’ as a game.
Perhaps we should have had more people to help us out with achieving ‘A Dalek Awakens’. It’s something to bear in mind for next time. Then again, I didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for and with this being our first-time experience, it was a big challenge to solve the puzzles involved.
The cross-breeding plants task was interesting, especially when we had to put in a sequence of plants in a box with one of the samples needing to be upside-down. The mixing compatible biological samples task required voice activation for us to add in two samples for some alien plankton to use. 🙂
This is for a water generation puzzle and the samples refer to alien races such as Sontarans, Zygons, Silurians and Silents. There is a charging magnetic core task, which required the use of power gloves to charge a lit-up node to unlit node, which took quite a lot of tries to get everything all powered-up.
‘A Dalek Awakens’ is undeniably a challenging and tense Escape Hunt game to get through, especially in an hour. But my Mum and I enjoyed the experience, especially as it was our first time doing it. I believe we’d do things so differently if we found ourselves doing ‘A Dalek Awakens’ again.
I’m sure I’ll be doing a TAKE TWO review on ‘A Dalek Awakens’ on my blog at some point, should we return to Cheltenham in future – possibly in May and possibly with a third member to help us out. Otherwise, I’m pleased I’ve experienced ‘A Dalek Awakens’ after listening to ‘Genetics of the Daleks’.
By the way, it was nice to do this Escape Hunt game for ‘Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary! 🙂
Thanks for reading!
Bye for now!
Tim 🙂
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