This is the fifth of a set of five reviews we are writing for Yelp, for the escape rooms we did on…read morea short sojourn to San Antonio and College Station in Texas. A short introduction to this set of reviews is included with our review for Komnata Quest. College Station itself is home to two escape room businesses, and we decided to give Padlock Games' Masquerade a go right before leaving Aggieland.
We had wanted to do the Masquerade room a year ago, when our daughter first arrived in College Station, but term was out, so we couldn't fit their hours into our schedule. Although parties and murder mysteries were common themes among the games we played, this was the only masquerade (the good kind!) themed escape room we had found along our route, so we were thrilled that we managed to book a slot this trip. We paid for the whole room, which was a four-person minimum charge, but even with just the three of us playing, it came to less per person than an average room in a bigger city.
Parking was free, as parking is outside of college property, and it was the perfect day to do an escape room because it was raining. There was already another group playing either Kidnapped or Secret Study when we arrived to play Masquerade, and they sounded like they were having a blast, so our sense of anticipation was heightened at once. The lobby was very Insta-friendly, with antique keys and the like adorning the walls, although the facility itself seemed smaller than the other businesses we had been to. It looked as though Andrea, our cheerful and friendly game mistress, was actually hosting at least two of the three games at her reception desk. But they certainly made good use of the space they had to provide a set of compelling and riveting puzzles in a well-designed challenge.
The story was straightforward enough: having been invited to a masquerade dinner party, we arrive to discover our hostess had just been murdered. We had to discover the name of her murderer as well as find the key to leave the party in an hour.
The look of the room was likely inspired by the Phantom of the Opera and the Great Gatsby. It was lit as a dinner party should be, and filled with everything a masquerade ball would have. The puzzles were some of the most original we've seen - and, no surprise, really, because Padlock Games primary clientele would be college groups and, perhaps, families arriving for graduation. The room was spacious and the sophisticated layout complemented the hoity-toity soiree air of the game. We would have been quite comfortable including our wheel-chair bound grandparents, in fact. We did feel at times that there were more red herrings than puzzles - but that may actually have to do with us being distracted by the décor of the room rather than it being any kind of deliberate misdirection. There were also more hardware store locks than we wanted to play with - but we, erm, didn't actually get to the point of actually needing to play with them much!
What's the best part about losing to a room? Going through all the puzzles with our game host and seeing the game host stumble on the puzzles, of course! For us, beating the room is only one way to play an escape room. In the event of the room winning, we always enjoy talking with our game hosts and seeing how we missed the most obvious clues. It's always great when the game host gives us due credit for puzzles solved and is able to laugh with us when the room proves even more sneaky than all of us combined. Masquerade is comparatively low-tech, and required a fair bit of paper and pencil work, but the best puzzle was galvanic! There were not very many locks at all, but each puzzle took a good while to work out, and if Andrea had not been as attentive as she was in providing very much needed clues - even while monitoring at least one other game, we would have been totally lost. As it were, she was en pointe with every request for a hint. We had to wait five minutes between hints, but it was part of the game, and this system was new to us, so it worked out.
To top it off, our photos were great! Padlock Escape Games' Facebook page was updated last 5 December 2020, so we just missed being part of their album to date, but we loved our photos with their props, and we left feeling as chuffed as if we had won the game. Our escape room experience in College Station certainly measured well against the more high-tech and more expensive games we've played. We're so sorry we didn't have enough time to play their other games!
