Take on the Cornwall Escape Room Challenge and support Quiet Connections

From 17th August to 17th September 2026, three escape rooms in Cornwall are joining together for the first Cornwall Escape Room Challenge, with £1 from every booking made during the month donated to Quiet Connections CIC.

The three taking part are Escape Rooms Cornwall in Penzance, Locked In Escape Rooms in Camborne and Escape Time in St Ives.

And there’s a discount too. Use QC10 when you book at any of the three escape rooms and you’ll get 10% off your game.

There’s also a prize draw to win a private escape room game. Your game doesn’t need to take place before 17th September either. As long as you make the booking during the Challenge period, you can choose an available date later in the year.

We’re really pleased they’re supporting Quiet Connections. Escape Rooms Cornwall, who started the Challenge, told us their aim has always been to bring more playfulness, fun and connection into people’s lives through the stories and puzzles in all of the games. And because of that, Quiet Connections feels like a really natural fit because so much of what we do is about helping people connect with other people, too.

And anyone who has been around our community a while knows we have a history of introducing quieteers to escape rooms…

We’ve had a few escape room adventures of our own

Last year, 18 of us took on all three games at Locked In Escape Rooms in Camborne. Most people had never done an escape room before.

It was our first experiment with an escape room activity that looked as though it might be fun, but also came with plenty of unknowns and nerves. You’re in a themed room, there’s a clock running, you have to work out what on earth various objects are for, and before long you find yourself puzzling over clues, repeating riddles and staring suspiciously at a key that surely must open something.

We found it a really fun way to stretch our comfort zones, and wrote about that first escape room experience here. We later went back to Locked In with another group to try different rooms.

Five members of our community were also invited to Escape Rooms Cornwall in Penzance to be among the first people to try their new game, 28 Pasties Later. This one involves a crumbling corner shop, a 90-minute game and an outbreak of something bitey, with the fate of humanity in your hands.

Most of the group were new to escape rooms and some had only just met.

Naturally, there were nerves before starting. One person was offered a quiet look around the space first, so they could see what to expect, ask questions and understand how they could step out if they needed to. Having that information made enough difference for them to decide they wanted to join in.

They didn’t actually escape. They did, however, head for drinks afterwards and spend time laughing about what had happened, which probably tells you something about how much the final result mattered. One participant described the experience like this: “We met one minute and were holding hands the next.”

Why the playfulness matters

Through these visits, we’ve started to notice that the playful side of an escape room matters just as much as the puzzles themselves.

We’ve written before about play and how easily it can get pushed aside in adult life by all the things that seem more useful or productive. An escape room gives you an hour where you’re allowed to get curious, try things, be a bit silly and see what happens.

Someone finds a code in a book and suddenly everyone has a theory. You try the same key in three different locks even though it clearly doesn’t fit any of them. Somebody suggests something that sounds ridiculous, so you try it anyway, and annoyingly they’re right.

Five minutes later, you’re all completely convinced you’ve cracked another clue, only to discover you’ve been enthusiastically solving a red herring – and it doesn’t really matter. You laugh, abandon that idea and start looking somewhere else.

That freedom to experiment and get things wrong is part of the fun. It also seems to change the feeling between people. Your attention is on whatever strange thing is happening in the room, rather than on whether you’re saying the right thing or making a good impression.

The enjoyment matters too. In our piece about what positive emotions actually do, we explored how moments of interest, amusement and curiosity can widen our attention a little and make us more open to exploring what’s around us.

That doesn’t mean nerves simply disappear because we’re having fun. They can sit alongside each other.

We saw that in Penzance.

One person wanted to understand the room before deciding whether to take part, so they were offered a quiet look around and a chance to ask questions. Just having a better idea of what to expect gave them enough reassurance to choose to join in. (If seeing the space beforehand would help you too, you’re welcome to ask the gamesmaster at the escape rooms.)

Once the game gets going, there’s already plenty to talk about without anyone having to think of conversation for its own sake.

Have we used this key? What do you think those numbers mean? Is that actually a clue, or have we all completely overthought it?

Someone passes you a riddle they’ve found. You both realise you’ve been confidently reading the same clue completely wrong and laugh about it. Another person, quietly looking around the room, notices the detail everybody else has missed.

People contribute in different ways throughout the game. One person might be good at spotting patterns. Someone else remembers where they saw something twenty minutes ago. Another person takes their time looking around and finds the clue the rest of the team somehow ignored.

And because everyone’s attention is moving around the room, it can feel easier to join in without feeling as though all the attention is on you.

Getting to know each other happens in amongst all of that.

We explored this more fully after our second Camborne visit in Connection Without Conversation: How an Escape Room Replaces Small Talk.

For us, that’s become one of the nicest things about playing together. You can arrive feeling a bit unsure of the people around you, get absorbed in trying to work something out, laugh together when it goes wrong, and gradually feel more comfortable being part of the group.

We know escape rooms won’t be everybody’s idea of fun. But if you’ve been curious and wondered whether you’d actually enjoy one, our experience might reassure you.

You don’t need to be the loudest person in the room, or the quickest with an answer. Sometimes the person quietly looking at the thing everyone else has dismissed is exactly the person the team needs.

Three escape rooms, one Cornwall challenge

There are some very different games to choose from across the three venues.

At Escape Rooms Cornwall in Penzance, you can take on 28 Pasties Later, the 90-minute game our group tested last summer, where a distinctly Cornish disaster has led to a pasty-fuelled zombie outbreak and you’re trying to help save what’s left of humanity. There’s also Death By Prescription, set in a wartime Penzance surgery where patients have been disappearing, and The Lamorna Brown Affair, which stars your team in Penzance’s biggest an art heist.

Book at: escaperoomscornwall.com

At Locked In Escape Rooms in Camborne, we’ve now tried all three games between our groups. The Smoke House Curse is the darker, more challenging one, with a curse to break before the hour runs out. Puzzle Escape 2.0 is brighter and has no scares, and it’s a good place to start if you’re completely new to escape rooms or have younger family members with you. And Pasty Escape sends you after some mischievous Cornish piskies who have made off with the ingredients for an old family pasty recipe.

Book at: lockedincornwall.com

Then there’s Escape Time in St Ives, which will be our next Quiet Connections visit! Lost Treasure of Pirate Kernow is the gentler option, with no scares. You’re aboard a sinking pirate ship with an hour to find Captain Kernow’s lost treasure. At the other end of the scale is St Ives Slayer, a fun horror game where you’ve been abducted by a killer and need to escape his lair. You can choose the scare intensity when you arrive, with the higher-intensity version including a blindfolded kidnapping-style start.

Book at: escapetimestives.co.uk

So whether you fancy pirates and piskies, a Cornish zombie outbreak, an art heist, something spooky or something with no scares at all, there’s quite a range to choose from.

• Any booking made between 17th August and 17th September counts towards the Challenge.
• You can play later in the year too. It’s the date you book that matters, rather than the date you actually enter the room.
• The escape room contributes a £1 donation from each booking to Quiet Connections CIC (that isn’t an extra charge added to your booking). Donations support the wider work that keeps our community going here in Cornwall.
• Remember to use the code QC10 for 10% off when you book.

Find out more about the Challenge and choose your escape room.