There has been passing mention of the _Beat The Bomb_ chain in the US, and the paint bomb game is definitely a small genre of its own (there's also _It's A Blast Vegas_ in Sin City and _Glow or Go_ in Dallas and LA, plus _Bomb Squad_ in Europe, and more in Asia, and I'm sure there must be others I don't know about). One's coming to the UK, where I think it should do rather well. I wouldn't be at all surprised if more opened elsewhere over here, or other businesses opened doing similar things, maybe even more explicitly slimy.

https://boomlabexperience.com/ has the details; as you probably guessed it's in London, and more specifically it's coming to Shoreditch, really just around the corner from that hipster ball pool bar. The resemblance to https://dallas.gloworgo.games/ is uncanny.

Might this be an excuse for a splunch?

It's clearly the same company. The fact that you get blasted with paint whilst wearing a hazmat suit is a BIG appeal for me. As usual I don't feel it would be ethical to do this with actual friends if they are not aware it's a 'thing' for someone.

This is an entirely fair point with noble thinking behind it, and also why I suggest a team from these parts, where we all know we have at least somewhat similar freak flags flapping in the breeze, would be super, uncomplicated fun.

I gave this a go tonight. I'm glad I did, and I would go back to play it again, so that's a recommendation of sorts.

You get five ten-minute fairly physical games plus a five-minute finale. The games have a bit of thought and inspiration to them, but there are some other similar places out there that offer a lot more variety. I liked the "the floor is lava" game at the end, which is one I hadn't seen before, and I was tired enough from the other games before it that it was a decent challenge, especially when tripping over your own shoelaces. The paint bomb finale will give you a very exciting close-finish run for your money.

The gear wasn't 100% rock solid and the staff weren't on top of their game but it's only been open a few days. As a WAM experience, it's not really there - the paint is very dilute, and of course your clothes are thoroughly protected. The paint explosion is very hit-or-miss; I got what felt like a pretty light spraying, though my teammate thought it felt more intense than he was expecting. So good-not-great games, mid service and very mid messiness, but the price is, while not cheap, a lot more reasonable than other things to do in central London and the overall experience is more than the sum of its parts.

I didn't get the sense that it had a great deal of passion behind it, but I'm rooting for it all the same, not least because it might well inspire other, similar games with a bit more imagination. In the US, the similar-principle _Beat The Bomb_ has a version of its game with an explicit slime dumping at the end; the slime looks similarly weak and watery, but these things all walk so that something some day might run.