Disappointed that I can't leave 0 stars for this. My friends and I booked the doomsday room for our visit. Upon entering the establishment, the one employee that claims to be the manager already had a negative attitude toward one of the other groups in the middle of their escape room experience, complaining that they were asking for too many hints and were basically asking to have everything solved for them. At the time, I chalked it up to a bad group, but that should've been the red flag for us to back out of this.
Once we entered the room, we were given very minimal backstory about the theme of the room itself, which is usually a staple of escape rooms in general.
Very little creativity in the puzzles themselves. It was just a lot of trying to figure out several different locks and keys. There was one creative puzzle where we had to place different colored key cards on top of a box in a specific order. We figured out the order we had to place them in, however, it would not unlock the adjacent box as it should've. After further inspection, we figured out that the sensor below the purple key card had been disconnected as the duct tape holding it together had gave way. This is the first escape room we had to fix one of the puzzles for the establishment.
Duct tape seemed to be a common thing trying to hold everything together for this room. There was another puzzle where we would have to control an RC car behind plexiglass to get another key. When we found the controller, the controller itself was busted as it would not move the car. When we notified the employees about this, they told us to remove the duct tape from the glass to take it down, manually move the RV car, and "solve the puzzle" this way.
In our entire time there we only asked for one clue, to which the employee on the walkie talkie responded asking "well where are you" and "how many of the jars have you found and where did you find them". This really surprised me, as escape rooms typically have someone monitoring the groups in their rooms through a camera so that when asked for a hint, they can give a relevant one. How are we supposed to say where we are in the game when the "puzzles" seemed to have very little connectivity with each other? After a couple of minutes, she advised me to find one in the lower left desk drawer, which we had been trying to do in the first place, so that did not feel like a clue. Afterwards, she just decided to give me the combination to a different drawer to "get us moving along", which is not what we were looking for.
When the room had run out of time, we spent a few minutes waiting for someone to let us out. We tried opening the door ourselves but it was locked. Eventually, we had to notify the employees through the walkie talkie for them to let us out.
Suffice to say, we were not happy. I stayed behind to ask for some sort of partial refund since there were several problems with the room and how the room was run. The manager was extremely dismissive and had a poor attitude, did not even look at me when she gave me an "apology" card for a $25 discount on our next visit. Given that we paid $28 per person for this visit for our group of 8 people, we will not be returning to Escape 101. I tried explaining the key card problem where we fixed the tape and wire sensor for them, and she accused us of fucking with the puzzle and breaking it ourselves. She further goes on to say "sorry we were so busy trying to manage 5 other rooms" as an excuse as to why our experience was so poor (there were two employees running this room. "Caitlyn" was very apologetic towards us, "Bethany" was the extremely dismissive manager), which, for an escape room, should never be an excuse for anything.
Overall, 0 stars for Escape 101. Not sure how this has an average of 4.5 on Google. I would advise anyone looking for an escape room to look elsewhere. It was the first ever escape room for a couple members in our party, and I can only hope this experience does not turn them away from wanting to do future escape rooms. read more