| rev:text
| - This was my first time going to a room escape place but I have tried room escape games (Flash games) before and had high hopes for this establishment. First things I saw were a counter with a friendly staff member who greeted us, asked us whether we already booked a room. After we made the payment ($12 per person with a screenshot of our Facebook check-in and paid in cash), we've been shown an area with board games, water, and washrooms that we could use while we were waiting for the rest of us to show up. There were also Wall of Fame and Wall of Shame filled with instant print photographs (kind of like those Fuji ripoff of Polaroid). Oh, if it's your first time (as was the case for me), you have to sign a waiver basically saying that you're not holding them responsible for any accidents, etc. that might take place. From my experience, there was nothing that could present any serious risk (unless you're very clumsy), and they have a camera, a button to call them, and an emergency key so you should be good. They seem to take the matter of your safety very seriously, which was reassuring.
I went with three other friends this evening (April 2nd, 2015) and we went into Cryptic Cellar, rated at a difficulty of 3.5/5. We were led to the room and given a few instructions and the basic outline of the story. Unfortunately, the props and the decor were not up to par with my expectation (since I was expecting video game level), and the puzzles boiled down to using different clues to opening a series of different locks in a certain sequence. The dim lighting somewhat added a certain mood to the atmosphere but it also made it harder for us to see things. Luckily we had our phones with flashlight functions.
After gathering and locating all the locks we needed to open, we were stuck after opening the first one for the first 10 minutes or so. Thankfully, we weren't being hoarders and decided to use the one clue (we can ask for more, but then it would count as a loss). When a staff member came in and started to give some suggestions, I realized the direction we should be taking, and though we had a bit of struggle throughout, we were able to get through the whole thing with about 13 minutes to spare (only one of us had been to another room at ESC-IT, and he said that he didn't make it out that time). So we started goofing around for 10 minutes, taking pictures with the props. We've been asked to keep the pictures to ourselves (so that we don't spoil it for others), but they were cool with it.
After we got out, they took a picture of us to add to the Wall of Fame. They had permanent markers available so that you can write or draw on it.
Overall, it was an interesting and fun (and safe) experience, but I wouldn't pay the full $20 for it. There wasn't enough for me to be really immersed or engaged with the story/situation - but then my model of comparison consist of a number of fun, scary, point and click games. Maybe it will be more engaging in the harder ones. I would come back to give one of those a try. As for the difficulty rating for the puzzles, I would say 3.5/5 would be about right.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)