Photo Finish – A Door in a Wall: Horses For Corpses

I galloped along to solve a murder at A Door In A Wall: Horses For Corpses an outdoor murder mystery set in the Stables Market in Camden. The whole adventure lasts for 3 hours. In those 3 hours you have to follow clues and solve riddles all around Camden market place.

A Door in a Wall: Horses For Corpses

The intro

Firstly you sign up with other teams in a small office by giving your team name and having your photo taken and handed a booklet.  You are then told that there has been a murder and we are led to the crime scene room where there is a body slumped over the desk.  From there we start our adventure and get told a bit about what has happened to the poor victim.  It is our mission to then solve the murder, why and how did it happen?

Let the galloping begin

Within the booklet there is some information and a map and a choice of five locations that we could start off at.  The map was quite easy to follow and most clues not too hard to find,  however there were a few that were really hard so we needed hints but in my opinion there was a bit too much to read in parts.  With there being so many areas to get around in Camden and time against us due to the fact that Camden was particularly over crowded this day as there was a Cheese Festival on and it made it hard to complete all courses.  However we found out that we should actually read everything even the newspaper that we got given at the beginning but as I said with there being so much to read and take in and complete it was just not possible.

The other downside to this game was that quite a lot of the clues had to be done via our mobiles but with signal being poor (depending what network you have) or mobiles draining because of battery this took up time and we had three mobiles between us and each of ours were very slow in getting up the information.  So be warned take a good battery pack with you and make sure that you all have topped up phones as you will certainly need them and if you have a good connection to Wi-Fi/4G then even better.

Along the way there were several actors to interact with which I loved as it made the whole game feel immersive.  However some of the scenes took a little too long and had no relevance to the crime and then you are handed yet another lengthy piece of information to read.  Rather than them giving us more to read I would rather they told us in further information via riddles.

Verdict

By the end of the whole game of Horses for Corpses we did solve the case but I felt like this game could have easily been broken down by not having so much to read, having more clues/riddles given verbally by the actors/actresses and maybe to make it even easier with mobiles if an app is created.  On the website plus in the office we were told we’d have time to have a break or some food in between solving clues,  but this was not possible, whether this was due to the cheese festival that was taking place which slowed us down or the amount of clues we had to follow,  I really don’t know but we did not have time to chill and eat.

However saying all the above I did really enjoy the race in trying to solve the murder and the actual game but I really wish we had more time and not so much to read ie lengthy newspaper article.  The two particular parts that I loved the most was the crime scene at the beginning interacting with one of the characters and searching for clues in the room and the second part I loved about the whole hunt was the leaflet we got on one of the courses that we had to solve a number of clues that was fun.

I do recommend A Door in a Wall as the game was good and all their other games in the past have always been great. It was just a pity that it was far too crowded in the Camden area the day I went so did not make it a pleasurable one.