I've played a fairly large range of escape rooms in the Seattle area and this is undeniably the worst escape room experience I've ever had. If you read no other part of this review, I recommend that you explore to the other better designed escape rooms in the area.
We chose the Space Wars room, which they themselves have rated the hardest of their own escape rooms. However, I wouldn't even consider this a difficult escape room, it's a frustrating and poorly designed room intentionally predicated on removing the ability to communicate. The puzzles themselves are simplistic and overall feel like busy work, and they're frustrating because one group of players cannot actually talk to the others.
It's a room in which players are split between two rooms, and one group of players has a very low quality push to talk microphone as well as a camera into the other. The other group had no means to verbally communicate to us, what they were seeing or what feedback they had. Our group of players had significant difficulty in even understanding what we were trying to say to them, as the quality of the audio was so poor. There was no actual critical thinking actually required of the puzzles. The majority of the puzzles in the room required precise timing and were unforgiving; which was an incredibly frustrating given the barriers created to prevent communication. Attempting to tell a player in a different room to stop holding a lever within fractions of a second, via a grainy microphone, is bad.
Furthermore, this room is incredibly linear, there are no opportunities for the groups to operate in parallel. Each puzzle is a prerequisite for solving the next. For the vast majority of the experience, one person was watching the screen and holding down the microphone button, one other person was interacting with the puzzle, and our other teammates were standing around doing nothing. This is intentionally reflected in the room's own design, we were given a sheet which listed the order were were supposed to do the puzzles.
This escape room is not friendly to those with color blindness or to those with hearing disabilities. Be aware that some puzzles require prior knowledge of certain games and media.
The staff is courteous and friendly, and I can't fault them for the rooms that they're managing. The room is itself well decorated, maintaining its theme decently well. But otherwise, Quest Factor has failed spectacularly to make an engaging or interesting experience.
I can only recommend to the owners of Quest Factor that they return this room to beta testing and seriously rework how this room is designed. I can only expect their other rooms reflect these same bad design choices that we experienced in this one. I won't be returning to Quest Factor given the experience we shared, and I encourage others to puzzle elsewhere. read more