Every business has an origin story. Ours starts in 2016, in Camborne, when escape rooms were still new enough in the UK that most people needed the concept explained twice. Locked In opened its doors that year and has been running ever since — but the current chapter starts with a rainy day in Europe, where Alex Hart wandered into his first escape room on holiday and fell in love with the format. When COVID hit and the previous owner moved on to pastures new, Alex bought the business — and used the shutdown to rebuild it: full internal refurbishment, then a brand-new game designed from scratch. The new room was a hit, the hobby became full-time work, and the rest of this page is what that turned into.
However it started, here’s what it became: the longest-running escape room venue in Cornwall, three hand-built games, and a small team that still builds everything twenty feet from where you play it.
The “build it ourselves” decision
The defining choice happened early. When escape rooms boomed, a whole industry sprang up selling ready-made games — buy the kit, follow the manual, open in a month. Plenty of venues went that route, and it shows: the same rooms, the same puzzles, repeated across the country.
We went the other way. Every room at Locked In Cornwall was designed and built in-house — story first, then puzzles that belong to the story, then months of playtesting on anyone brave enough to volunteer. It’s slower and it’s harder, and it’s the reason you can’t play our rooms anywhere else on the planet. (Here’s the full design process, for the curious.)
Three rooms, three personalities
The Smoke House Curse is the atmospheric one — Denzel, his doomed obsession with magic, and a room thick with consequences. It’s the game we point date nights and veteran players at.
Puzzle Escape 2.0 is the generous one — built so a first-timer, a kid or a grandparent all get their hero moment. If someone tells us “we’ve never done one of these”, this is the door we open.
Pasty Escape is the Cornish one, and the one strangers have usually heard about: an age-old family pasty recipe, a gang of thieving piskies, and an hour to save the family legacy. The venue around it has five TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice awards to its name (2021, then every year from 2023 to 2026 — the top 10% of attractions worldwide), and only 83% of teams beat it, a number our regulars take extremely personally.
The bit that matters: the people
Day to day it’s Alex plus game masters Charlie and Rob — two names you’ll find scattered through our reviews, usually next to words like “patient”, “brilliant” and “gave us the hint at exactly the right moment”. Between them they brief the teams, run the games, and keep the piskies in working order.
What we can say without checking with anyone: the person who briefs your team probably built the puzzle you’re about to argue over, and the debrief opinions you share on the way out genuinely shape the next version of the room.
Still here, still building
The venue keeps growing sideways: in 2026 we launched The Sleuth Society — Cornwall’s first regular social deduction game night, hosting Blood on the Clocktower inside the venue — because after a decade of locking people in rooms, giving them permission to lie to each other seemed the natural next step.
The rooms are in Camborne, the parking’s free, and the piskies remain at large. Come see for yourself — or better, book a door and stand behind it.