Escape room entrepreneurs have revealed plans to launch a family-fun entertainment centre in the heart of a town.

Owners of The Panic Room in Gravesend have bought the 13,000sqft unit at the back of former BHS store and are hoping it will be ready by summer this year.

Alex and Monique talk on their new venture

Since opening in 2016, Alex and Monique Souter have expanded their escape experiences to online games, axe throwing and two more branches in Essex and Niagara Falls in America.

And it's not hard to work out why they've gone from strength to strength, having taken on the hardest room myself.

The LOOP experience has a difficulty rating of four out of five, what could go wrong?

It was suggested to have two to six players over the age of 12 so I roped my friend in who lives outside of the county and accepted the challenge after commenting "isn't the whole of Kent just a big escape room?" Readers, I did not laugh.

We headed down to the company's town centre base at the back of the St George's Centre where we were greeted by game master Reece who was appropriately kitted out in a lab coat for our sci-fi-themed experience.

We straight away got along with Reece who you could tell absolutely loved his job and made the whole day out that extra bit more entertaining.

Before we could enter the room we were instructed to watch a health and safety video and then handed our communication device which would prompt clues if he saw we were struggling.

Seeing that we were already confused, he ran through the basics of the game, walked us to the room and quickly shut the door wishing us luck.

The clock was now ticking.

LOOP involves two separate rooms with essentially three main puzzles in each which involve a lot of exploring, inventive thinking and trial and error.

Without giving too much away, the experience is advertised as: "Step into the laboratory of Frontier Engineering, a research company tackling the unknowns of science, one mind-boggling paradox at a time.

"Undertake a 60-minute trial of a mysterious and powerful device they call ‘The Unit’. They won’t tell us what it does, but they assure us that it is completely safe.

"In this weird science fiction adventure with strong undertones of Portal, you will be transported to impossible places and experience one of the craziest twists in escape room history.

"Seriously, this game will blow your minds!

"A game that totally redefines the meaning of ‘against the clock’, this experience is one that gamers and sci-fi fans will love! Science waits for no one, so prepare to enter….The Loop!"

And it really is a new way to experience an escape room and is 100% one of the best I have ever done and think I will ever do due to the major plot twist.

As a spoiler-free review, all I can say is it left me hungry for Thai food, the flying golf balls scared the living daylights out of me and don't think the hole punching is easy...

Owners Alex and Monique Souter are the masterminds behind all the experiences and are now launching their next business venture after buying the back unit of former BHS building in New Road, Gravesend.

Alex said: "We wanted to bring something completely different to the town and make something that is all-inclusive for anyone.

"We are bringing some entertainment here as there is not a lot of family-friendly entertainment you can do. We have the escape rooms but if you are not interested in that they still need something fun to do.

"We want something that you can go into and almost jump from activity to activity and keep it as reasonably priced as possible without having to worry about breaking the bank.

"It is not just escape rooms, it will have everything under the sun. We are trying to create the greatest hits of all the modern and latest fun activities for friends and family to enjoy.

"I think the local people really deserve somewhere where they can have fun and be proud to have something local and home grown rather than a big chain of something. We are really excited to put our stamp on something new.

"We started as a little pop-up in the old town hall and here we are today."

They are creating a family-friendly entertainment centre in the 13,000 sq ft space where their popular Battle Masters axe throwing will be moved to and improved by adding more lanes and mini games including projections which can move the bullseye and really put players' aim to the test.

It will also hopefully include a mystery adventure golf among other fun activities where people can spend the whole day.

Monique added: "We would love to see people being proud of Gravesend again and seeing people all around the local area come back to the town to have a good, fun time.

"It is a lovely town with great heritage and we need to build on that and make sure people want to come back and spend time around here.

"We wanted to create something for the town so people do not always need to go to Bluewater. We are trying to show what Gravesend has to offer."

But it has not all been smooth sailing for the duo as they were forced to close their doors during Covid and things looked scary for the entertainment industry, said Monique.

In an attempt to make ends meet, Alex started developing the idea of online escape rooms in the hope that people would be looking for something different to do.

He said: "It has certainly been difficult particularly over the last couple of years but we have worked really hard together to bounce back as much as possible.

"When we had to close down due to Covid essentially all of our business stopped and so we had to diversify as quickly as possible to ensure that we could keep going.

"We ended up creating a series of online escape rooms that people could play from the comfort of their own home. What started as one or two games quickly over the course of last few years has become 20 games. The whole thing kind of blew up.

"It was essentially a massive lifeline to the business. Without the online escape rooms to keep everything coming, who knows what would have happened to the company without that support.

"We worked day and night and now hundreds of thousands of people have played them across the world. So we are not just a Gravesend local company, we are a world wide company."

Their games have been played in Japan, American and Canada to name a few.

Alex added: "One thing we have noticed is there are a lot of people now coming for the first time, people who played the online escape rooms and were interested in doing the real thing."

The Panic Rooms Gravesend has three locations – in the St George's Centre, Milton Road and Berkley Crescent – and is currently offering more than 12 escape experiences with two new rooms currently under development, called Hell House and an 18+ game Riddle.