| rev:text
| - Cool entrance, great staff. Rooms beautifully designed and immersive. Pro tip: Unlike some other escape rooms, this place lets you bring your belongings into the room with you, which is really nice if you're worried about missing an emergency call or need a personal item.
I've now done two rooms at Escape in Time. The first was Water Landing. Highly recommend! We took 7 family members and had a blast, it was fun for *everyone* in our group. It was just a great time and totally worth it (even without a Groupon!) 5 stars for sure. I liked Water Landing so much, I booked another outing for a group of friends. We did Captain's Cove the second time. It was *completely* disappointing compared to Water Landing. One star. Which is why I've averaged to 3.
Let me try to explain why I felt Captains Cove was so much worse than Water Landing, in case it is helpful in some way to the owners (without giving anything away!)
1. In Water Landing, there are clues that everyone could talk about and work on together. Even if you weren't the one physically holding the object, or whatever, it was possible to weigh in on things to try or do. It felt very collaborative. Captains Cove has a higher ratio of puzzles where you have to physically manipulate something so only one or maybe two people can really work on it at a time and everyone else kind of sits around waiting.
2. In Water Landing, one part of it required an extra shove, which we didn't expect or try given how many times they tell you not to use brute force. But, for the most part, the clues were "fair," kept with the theme, and were fun to solve. In contrast, it seemed like many of the Pirates Cove puzzles did not make sense. There were a ton of red herrings, which would've been OK if the rest of the clues were solid. But most of the clues really were not solid. Particularly on one of the puzzles, there is absolutely no way we would've guessed what to do. I cannot believe *anyone* would figure it out without being pretty much explicitly told. And even after the staff member explicitly told us what to do, it didn't work. We had to try it a few times and she had to keep clarifying *exactly* how to do it before it finally did what it was supposed to. That was just disappointing/frustrating. It kind of felt like there was no point in trying to solve things for yourselves and instead had to just wait for hints.
I feel like there would be some simple fixes that could make Pirates Cove a *ton* better. I'll suggest 4:
1. Lowest-hanging fruit: it seemed oddly anachronistic to have plastic pieces for one of the clues. Would be so much better with wood or metal ones in terms of trying to maintain the illusion of time travel they were going for (and achieved so well elsewhere in the room).
2. If they'd written some cheesy poems or something and hid them , that would've helped make it clearer what to do to at least get people in the ballpark on the "hard" puzzles. (They weren't hard so much as just so odd you'd never guess to do the things you were supposed to.) And it'd help steer people away from the red herrings more. I think in general it would've made things a lot more fun, and still kept with the theme. To make it more challenging, torn/burned up poems you have to unscramble? Something like that would go a long way toward making it more fun and getting more of the people more involved; it would allow people to (in theory) make progress simultaneously and talk things over a bit more.
3. Make it more obvious when one thing triggers another thing. Our group honestly didn't know we'd "won" the game, because no one noticed something open to reveal the treasure. All of a sudden, a staff member just came in to congratulate us on solving the game. ("Um, but, we didn't solve the game? We didn't find the treasure, nor did we escape?") ("But you did find it! You just didn't know you'd found it! And now you escaped!") ("???") We had 15 minutes to spare, and it just seemed completely anticlimactic to be told the game was over suddenly(?) We wondered later whether we really won, or whether they were just trying to rush us out because other rooms were finishing...(?) Unsatisfying.
4. I cut my hand at one point, I'm not even sure exactly where. It was just completely not obvious what to do at certain points (so many red herrings!) so we were trying everything. There were lots of places it was possible to reach into, but were filled with sharp things(?) Like, poky wires or metal or something? I don't know. At some point my hand was just stinging and then bleeding a little. Seems potentially hazardous to have people bleeding and touching things? I was careful not to touch anything, but that kind of took away from the experience. Time for a tetanus booster!?
|
![[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)