| rev:text
| - We are experienced Escape Room players and found this business to be unprofessionally run and the room we were in was not well designed. Here's what happened...
We were five minutes away, so we checked to see that there were a lot of available reservations and then drove over. But when we arrived, we were told that everything was booked for the rest of the night. But then a different employee said we could start in 20 minutes. They took our money, but didn't have us sign any paperwork or waivers. The waiting room was chaotic and really noisy, yet we overheard some disagreements between employees about scheduling and a maintenance worker who was waiting to perform a job, but couldn't get into the room he needed to, presumably because customers were playing that Escape Room.
We were taken into our room and given a walkie-talkie. Now, I've played in rooms before where walkie-talkies are your communication with your game host. But these were cheap ones with poor connections and lag time. Each time we tried to talk to someone, the conversation was laughable because of the lack of clarity and our host's tendency to talk over us. Also, there is no sound proofing between the rooms, so other customers laughing and screaming is distracting and confusing when you're trying to listen to the walkie-talkie or an audio clue.
The staff do not appear to be well-trained in communication with guests or how the games work. There was a whole confusing effort when we asked for clarification about a map puzzle. It didn't appear that the game host knew the meaning of the word "departure". At another point, we wanted to alert the host that there was a lock that appeared to be broken. We eventually figured out on our own that it had a reset delay. But the employee should have known that about the lock and been able to explain it when we asked.
In our room, we experienced the single worst puzzle we've ever encountered. It required a black light (common in Escape Rooms) and graffiti on a wall (also common). But there was no way to even dim the lights, so we were straining to be able to see anything that would help us. We finally had to ask for a clue because there was no way to continue. We were asked what numbers we had so far. I told the game host the four numbers we'd come up with. She told us two of them were correct. When we finally solved it, it turned out that three of the numbers we'd come up with were actually correct so we had been misled by the game host and lost significant time because of it.
Other parts of the design were lazy, the whole presentation needed to be cleaned up and some of the props needed to be replaced. Presumably, this is why there was somebody there to do maintenance. It's too bad that that person wasn't being allowed to do their job. But it bears noting that a busy weekend night is a curious time to hire somebody to do maintenance.
On the other hand, we liked the layout of the rooms and one of the rooms was dedicated to quite an elegant puzzle that I really enjoyed solving.
In the end, we finished the experience, opened our door to freedom and - no surprise - there was nobody there to greet us. There were a lot of noisy customers, but no staff present. We stood there for awhile, then just as we were about to leave, a person we had never seen before popped out from behind a curtain and told us our solving time. As many people have noted, however, this business does not have countdown clocks in the room. And, in the end, the employee's time calculation and my own did not match.
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