My friends and I played Butcher's Lab, and Top Secret Mission. It was a fun experience; the decor and atmosphere for both games were great. I personally enjoyed Butcher's Lab a lot, due to the horror factor, jump scares, and it being a multi-room game. The reason why this review is only 3 stars is because each game had its share of deliberate time-wasting parts that had nothing to do with whether or not you're smart enough to solve puzzles.
Top Secret Mission was mediocre; the decor was alright, but it was barely a multi-room game. The physical challenge for passing a certain area was honestly overly difficult; they should make it so that you don't need TWO consecutive successes in order to reach the goal. By making it so that if one person messed up, the other person would also have to do it all over again was a huge waste of time. It would've been more reasonable if just one person had to redo if they messed up; not both people redo if one person messes up. That was my main complaint for that game. We would've escaped if we hadn't wasted so much time at this area; it was too time consuming.
I thoroughly enjoyed Butcher's Lab; everything was as creepy and scary as I'd hoped it would be. The main time-wasting factor in this game was the constant seizure-inducing flickering lights that couldn't be controlled. They should honestly have an epilepsy warning for that room. The dim lights constantly flickering was giving my friends a headache, and gave us all serious eye strain. The most annoying part was when all the lights would flicker off for about 7 seconds in approximately 20 second intervals, meaning you'd have to wait for the lights to turn back on, every 20 seconds or so. You'd stand in the dark for at least 7 seconds, just waiting. That was singularly the most irritating escape game lighting feature I've had, and I'd played 35 escape games at various places before this. Honestly, more than scared, we were just pissed off that the lights kept turning off, wasting our time, and straining our eyes when the dim lights flickered back on weakly, like dying batteries. We escaped anyway, despite the lighting challenges.
We were a group of 4 at the time, so we couldn't try Ancient Temple, which we were interested in. But between the stupid physical requirement of Top Secret Mission, and the terrible light job in Butcher's Lab, my friends and I are reluctant to come back for Ancient Temple. Would've given 4 stars if the aforementioned time-wasting components didn't exist; the puzzles were well balanced in terms of difficulty. read more