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| - The best escape rooms involve genuinely clever puzzles and make you feel exhilarated, even if you don't end up escaping successfully. Escape rooms with lazy puzzles amongst far too many red herrings, and involving broken equipment make you feel weary and frustrated even as you're just starting the room. Unfortunately, this was the case with the Death Note room.
We had a general awareness of the concept, but none of us were fans of the anime, so references to the original story were lost on us. Perhaps that background information is needed in order to really appreciate the homage to the source material.
In general this room was frustrating because of [spoilery warning:] the incredibly high amount of false leads, due to the amount of objects in the room. Red herrings should be relatively easy to rule out and overlook, but if you have shelves of likely over 100 items that can be flipped through and read, it's an effective way of wasting time, but it's just not a clever or satisfying way to stump people. There was one piece that fit so well with what we were trying to find near the end, only to be told that it has nothing to do with any of the puzzles, and I couldn't believe it.
Regarding the faulty equipment, without giving specifics, a clue was hidden within a piece of equipment that we spent a lot of time on until we asked about it and was told it wasn't working properly. The staff claimed it had never happened before, and we were given an extra 5 minutes because of it.
A particularly irritating part of the atmosphere of the room was that they played music (presumably from the anime) that was loud enough to be distracting on repeat throughout the hour. There was also another aspect that was incredibly hard to hear and decipher- again, not clever, just annoying.
Additionally in the waiting room, there were no board games or activities available so as we were asked to come 15 minutes early, we spent most of that time watching 2 incredibly repetitive Trapped commercials looping over and over.
Ideally, you and your group should be talking about how tricky the puzzles were after you leave, not how frustrating the experience was. We did the latter.
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