Happy Christmas, said BestMate, I've got us tickets to the Crystal Maze.
The Crystal Maze Live Experience is an immersive attraction based on, but not directly connected to, the iconic Channel 4 programme. It's not cheap, with tickets starting at £55 per person, but various London-based websites who received free tickets have described it as "worth every penny".
Alas this was my Christmas gift in 2019 and alas the tickets were booked for 21st March 2020 and alas this proved to be the very weekend the whole of UK hospitality locked down. Never mind, they said, we'd be more than happy to keep your money and let you rebook later, assuming we ever reopen. We decided to skip 2020 and most of 2021 and eventually plumped for a date at the start of December, keeping our fingers crossed that social restrictions wouldn't be reimposed by then. And somehow they haven't been so we finally got to attend this weekend, only ninety weeks late.
The Crystal Maze Live Experience opened in Islington in 2016, but following unprecedented demand moved to new premises in the heart of the West End in 2018.
Eight of us attended because you go round the maze in groups of eight, and if you come with less they threaten to make up the difference with assorted strangers. The majority of our group was made up of BestMate'sBrother'sFamily, which meant three teenagers as well as an assortment of adults - a combination which served us well.
The new premises are a former casino on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Golden Nugget, its upper floors remodelled into four thematic zones. That's Medieval, Future, Industrial and Aztec zones, in that order, starting at the top of the building and working your way down.
They told us to come "at least 30 minutes prior to your ticket time" so we arrived with 40 minutes to spare but apparently that was too early so we had to wait in reception. This cramped area doubles up as a souvenir shop and also as somewhere to flog you photos afterwards because you're not allowed to take any yourself. Phones, coats and jewellery go in lockers upstairs, your first challenge being to try to memorise the number you've stashed yours in.
Teams normally get to wear coloured satin jackets to add to the nostalgic vibe (except during times of pandemic when shared clothing is risky so you go round as is).
Ah I see how this works, I thought, as we were asked to wait for 20 minutes in a bar on the first floor. But my moneygrabbing assumptions proved incorrect when we were told not to order anything stronger than tapwater because nobody's supposed to enter the maze under the influence of alcohol. Instead we sat in one corner like lemons and wondered how long we still had to wait because all our timepieces were in the lockers. Try not to need the toilets.
Figaro's Bar opened a fortnight ago, is open to the wider public and is supposed to "have the feel of a clifftop looking out onto the Mediterranean Sea". I can confirm that this is total bolx.
At the allotted time you're sent up several more flights of stairs to be admitted to the maze. We were sent up too early and nearly gatecrashed the previous group, which is the kind of rookie error you'd have thought they'd have ironed out by now. The first room is somewhere to have a group photo taken and to sign an electronic waiver, which I totally bodged but they let me in anyway. A second (smaller) room then whisks you back to the 1990s with clips from the original TV programme, edited to make it looks like Richard O'Brien approves, and then your Maze Master nips out.
Channel 4 screened the Crystal Maze between 1990 and 1995, then again between 2017 and 2020. It was never filmed here.
The maze has several hosts, each leading a separate party through the maelstrom. These characters make or break your experience, but ours was absolutely excellent as befits (I suspect) a drama-trained resting actor. A mix of humour, brio and encouragement goes a very long way, which in this case is through four zones and down three floors. It's all been a bit underimpressive up to this point, but then you head through into Medieval and suddenly it's like stepping into the TV show.
The individual games may be physical, mental, skill or mystery. Your team leader gets to decide who plays each one.
Four different rooms lead off the cobbles, each with a door that'll slam shut if you linger inside too long. The two or three minutes allowed for completion are timed by the Maze Master on a cheap plastic timer rather than displayed anywhere you can see it. I suspect this allows for a little leeway, on the generous side, if that'll increase the drama of the situation. Every room also has a couple of windows so that remaining members of the team can look in and help, or maybe hinder, with whatever weird thing the player's been asked to do. Apparently teams don't normally win both of their first two games, or maybe we were only told that to make us more excited.
Each zone is cunningly split in two, allowing one group to be in the first half and another in the second, which optimises collective flow through the maze.
Before the end of the Medieval zone one of us had shot, one had rung, one had climbed and one had shuffled. Picking the right person for the right challenge turned out to be important, and having teenagers in the group made some of the physical challenges a breeze. But there's still an element of total luck involved, in that what's behind the door might be something you're good at, might be something you can conquer or might be a blown chance before you've even started. Try to ignore the black t-shirted game operatives involved in menial behind-the-scenes tasks occasionally walking through. Somewhere in the background a separate clock is ticking, counting down the allocated time before every group in the maze has to move on to the next segment.
Transferring between zones, or half-zones, usually involves a spell of physical activity ranging from very mild to properly active. Some crawling is involved.
The games are genuinely well constructed, both in material terms and with regard to how challenging they are to solve. Lights flash, pulleys turn, guns fire, cables connect and crystals magically roll down chutes if you're successful. Ideally bells don't ring if you want to avoid an automatic lock-in. Thematic dressing is successfully applied throughout, including video screens in the Future zone and an entirely sandy floor in Aztec. The time element is also carefully thought-through, in that you're genuinely up against it, although there were a couple of occasions when we smashed it and the Maze Master had to plug the surplus minutes with banter, which is where being a professional actor comes in.
Four games in each zone means a maximum of 16 crystals by the end, and also that everyone should play two games on the way through. The maze actually contains 32 games so each team only plays half of them.
I got two games to play, both of them mental, and failed on both. One I knew exactly how to solve but then added an extra rule which made it nigh impossible, having made the mistake of taking on board an extra piece of advice that'd been shouted through the window. The other game was based on subjective knowledge rather than deductive skill and therefore all too easy to bodge, which I did, so only escaped the room by taking on board an extra piece of advice that'd been shouted through the window. Somehow every member of BestMate'sFamily won two crystals from their two games, which was fabulous from a team point of view but only increased my sense of personal disaster.
After just over an hour you reach the Crystal Dome, a geodesic structure with fans beneath the floor, within which you have five seconds per crystal to grab (and post) as many gold tokens as you can.
We had 11 crystals by the end, causing our Maze Master to exclaim "double figures!" as if this were a rarity. That meant 55 seconds inside the dome, which again felt absolutely like the telly (except they'd removed all the silver tokens as a Christmas treat). The rest of my teammates reached and leapt and tried to grab the whirling tokens, whereas I'd spotted there were hugely more on the floor so scooped those into the slot instead. We did well, I think scoring 200-and-something, but the need to weigh the boxful at the end means I'm still not entirely sure how many we collected. Indeed our Maze Master's final words were almost drowned out by a minion hoovering all the tokens back beneath the floor of the dome, just before we were cast out and found ourselves back on the landing by the lockers.
A screen by the exit displays the All Time Highest Scores, revealing that 20 teams (including the Queen Bees and the Tena Ladies) have scored more than 850 and five have somehow broken 1000.
I became enormously suspicious of the high score table when it said that one group had scored 18946, significantly more than the number of tokens in the Dome and well over ten times higher than the second placed team. The very end of the experience almost blew the magic, but thankfully the buzz from the previous 70 minutes was still strong. We sat down in the bar and engaged in a lengthy post-mortem, having ordered a much cheaper round than they'd have liked, and generally agreed it had been a mighty successful afternoon. BestMate'sBrother'sFamily are very much escape room aficionados, so the fact they'd been hugely impressed spoke volumes.
The Crystal Maze Live Experience lives off its TripAdvisor score which is currently a maximum 5. It is most suitable for lively groups with cash to splash. It appears to be currently unbookable, either because it's sold out or because the website's rubbish.
On the way out we looked at the photos they'd taken and decided very much against buying any, in part because face coverings don't make for a joyful photograph but mostly because one of us had been wearing green and so had disappeared. I left the building collectively chuffed and personally disappointed. Not only had I blown both chances to win a crystal but I'd also flunked one of the transitions between zones and had to go round the back way, which somehow left me feeling old as well as incompetent. There's nothing quite like being confirmed as a failure in a game you've absolutely adored across three decades. Start the fans please.
