A high tech room does not a good escape room make.
My friends and I are escape room fanatics, and I've done probably over 50 escape rooms (Denver, Portland, San Francisco, LA, Seattle) in the past 4 years. Some rooms are high tech, some rooms are low tech - what makes them great are the quality and flow of the puzzles, the room's immersion (set) & story to make it memorable! Escape the room has excellent immersion sets & props, and to a certain extent, story - but that's about it.
We did the Jurrassic Park room first, and then Western Bank Heist room. The Jurrassic park room even smelled like hay and urine! (They said they meant for it to smell that way, let's hope that's true!) Also, the staff was wonderful as they checked us in, and led us through the whole speel of do's and don'ts of the room and the backstory.
What we found, compared to other rooms we've done: the puzzles were just BAD. Like, lazy. For example - "here are 4 random numbers etched somewhere let's try it on a lock" to here are random numbers again, and but good luck knowing what it goes to or what to do with it because the text is SUPER ambiguous and relates to nothing. Also - they are so high tech that some things just didn't work properly which was both frustrating & confusing because you don't know if you did it right the first time and it just didn't work - resulting in us having to call for help more times than we would have liked. Ultimately, in those situations (which was too many in my opinion) something was not set up properly, or something didn't work properly.
We did not enjoy the Jurassic room (a lack of number of puzzles, room malfunctions) but I have to admit the immersion was top notch. We didn't want to judge based solely on one - and, they could tell we were a little disappointed at how the room went (we got out but so many things went wrong) so we asked them for their recommendation and they recommended the bank heist room - so we did and it was equally disappointing but not in the same sense. The bank heist room had 1 malfunction, was a mix of high and low tech (magnets, and combination locks), but again, the puzzles were so random and "out there" that you take yourself out of the room for a second to contemplate what the designers were even thinking when they mapped the puzzles out. Terrible.
Sorry Escape the Room - we will be giving our business elsewhere. 1 star for your great staff, 2nd star for making the jurassic park room smell like urine and hay. That's about it. read more