How do you get across the rolling log? We ended up on the floor

LET’S start with what will probably be the main talking point for any players locked up in the new Prison Island attraction in Holloway.

How do you get from one side of a room to another by crawling along a rotating metal log on your tummy?

In this challenge, named waterfall, the emphasis is certainly on fall and one by one contestants are tossed to the floor and left wondering if there will be bruises in the morning.

You feel someone might be watching on and smiling in the control room.

Five of us entered the chain’s new London site on Thursday evening for a bit of team-bonding over Crystal Maze-style challenges.

After a perfunctory introduction which perhaps could be a little more enlightening on what lies ahead, you get 60 minutes to try more than 30 cells in the jail.

A cell full of giant balls; the photos and are provided by Prison Island and not images of the Tribune’s reporters

Behind each door you have to work out how to win points. Some are fairly obvious: kick footballs into boxes from behind a prison fence or use a laser gun to turn off lights on a spooky stained-glass window.

In others, the “game over” red light came on when we were still working out the objective.

It must be broken, we collectively decided for anything we didn’t understand.

You can’t spend too long wondering whether a grabber machine is actually switched on when something more exciting might be in the next room.

And there is much big-kid fun to be had if you pick the right door.

One requires a leap into a giant ball pit, another is a tennis ball-size game of pinball. The old Nokia favourite Snake makes an appearance, while a lights-out version of whack-a-mole gets everybody slapping a table frantically.

On it goes with memory tests and climbing poles, a quiz on world locations.

Players try to work out the way to score points as the clock runs down on an hour in Prison Island

You see your points rack up on screens in the corridors with the bragging rights of being the best team of the day being the main prize. Our chief rivals, “test run” and “alt-ctrl-del”, which we have to assume were real teams for our own self-worth, had no chance against us.

Prison Island has expanded across the country with the same model. It’s not quite clear why it has to have a jail theme, as there are no actor hosts pretending to be angry wardens and no key-jangling threat of getting locked in.

It’s awkward that the Google summary searches of autumn 2025 get confused with the old Holloway Prison; I looked for the address and was told by our new AI controllers of the web that this would be a “different concept” to the closed women’s jail.

No doubt, and this is to be enjoyed with friends.

The hour zipped by, but we will have to see if the near £30 a head pricepoint will lead to a long sentence in Islington.

• Prison Island is open seven days a week at 5-7 Hornsey Street, Holloway.