A fun way to spend an hour with family or friends! We escaped - with about 9 minutes left on the clock.
I've been dying to try an Escape Room since I've first started seeing them pop up in other countries I travel to. A few days ago I finally got my chance! I reserved the "Entrapment" episode for my family, a total of 6 of us - none of us ever having done an escape room before.
Every room has a theme or story surrounding it, but the premise is the same: find clues and solve puzzles to get your way out of the room. You'll be assigned a game master and in our case, our game master communicated with us through a computer, by populating messages on a screen. He helped guide us through some issues we had that seemed particularly confusing, without giving it away. If you get stuck, you're allowed to ask for help from your gamemaster, but you only get 3 clues before they start docking your time. We used all three clues, but out of the three, I felt we only truly needed one - the other two we probably could have figured out eventually.
There were a variety of puzzles in the room, none of which were particularly difficult to solve...but if you want to escape within 60 minutes, you'll need multiple people working on different puzzles, and you'll need to communicate!!! I don't remember actually solving any one puzzle on my own, as they all seem to intertwine. For example, you need the solution to puzzle A to solve puzzle B, so if I was trying to figure out puzzle B and someone solved puzzle A, suddenly puzzle B made more sense.
I'd definitely recommend getting a group together if you can rather than being paired up with strangers. There were times where we had to be, well, pretty frank with one another...and it'd be more difficult with someone you don't know.
There are a few ways this business could improve. First, although the theme was interesting, we found that the room itself had very little to do with the theme and we weren't sure what us escaping from the room had to do with the story, or whatever happened to the main character. Secondly, we had our photo taken after we escaped, and I wish I had them take one with my camera. They said it'd be posted on their website but I have yet to see it (on their website or Facebook?).
Finally - it's expensive if you're taking a group - I paid $167 for a group of 6. That's definitely pricier than a trip to the movie theater. However, if you're paying your own way as a part of a group, $28 seems more tolerable for an every-once-in-a-while type of thing.
I'd definitely do this again! read more