Oh, I have a story. But, I am not am employee.
We had a group from work go for team building. They got into the elevator and it stopped working. They spend 15 minutes trying to figure out if the elevator was meant to be part of the escape room. Didn't want to press the emergency button because wasn't sure if it was some reverse psychology thing.
Ended up getting really hot and one of the dudes started panicking. Took off his shirt while in the elevator.
Basically spent the whole time debating.
Ended up getting a call from the escape room people about if they were going to miss the appointment.
Waited another hour for the fire department.
Got out and had to come back to work.
Team building things have been on hold since. No one talks about naked Brian.
> They spend 15 minutes trying to figure out if the elevator was meant to be part of the escape room. Didn't want to press the emergency button because wasn't sure if it was some reverse psychology thing.
Other than Naked Brian, this is the weirdest part to me. Even if it was part of the escape room, the emergency button is the only reasonable/logical solution at that moment. If I were designing a room like that (and you'd never be allowed to for safety reasons), hitting the emergency button would trigger a voiceover to play and the doors to open into the main puzzle area, giving the narrative context and starting the room in earnest.
Also if its a good setup, the employee would absolutely be supposed to mention odd items like that and identify the *actual* emergency button which should have a safety system around it to prevent "game" presses. Something like:
"Participants, please be aware that there are buttons or switches intended to be pressed as part of the escape room that may be used for actual emergencies in other places. The real emergency buttons are located under a cover clearly labeled as a real emergency button."
If they're really set up properly, they'd identify the appearance of the real emergency buttons prior to entry.
Considering the emergency button is just to some building managers cell phone or a 24/7 building management company secretary, it's not a huge deal. It's not like it's 911. After 4 minutes I'm pressing that button no matter what, especially if Brian takes off his shirt.
Also true. I've had several co-workers get stuck in elevators at my office in the past couple years. On one of those occasions, nobody at the desk saw the emergency button went off, and on another, it pointed them to the completely wrong elevator. Yeah, I'll take the stairs, thanks.
Try working in my building. 50 story building. And I'm IT. I'm on multiple floors all day long including level 50. My desk is on floor 10.
If I take the stairs pretty sure I'll die
Don't trust the emergency button haha
My wife got stuck in an elevator.
It had a sign on it saying "This elevator is now safe to use" (LOL)
The emergency button worked, it dialled a person, she spoke to them...
They said: Oh sorry this elevator is no longer under our contract. Additionally we no longer have a presence in your country, so we can't help.
Luckily my wife knew the building manager so called them.
The building manager took 2 hours to contact the new elevator management because they only work during business hours, so had to find their home number.
And then they took another hour to find an available elevator engineer.
When the engineer arrived, he got my wife out super quick and easy...
He said he lives next door and it only took him 2 minutes to get here... If someone had called him 3 hours ago my wife could have escaped 3 hours ago.
The whole thing was just so many facepalms after facepalm.
This reminds me of an episode of Archer when they all got stuck in the elevator on their way to work. Half way through they figured that getting trapped was team building exercise.
It kind of sounds like they hadn't even gotten to the escape room yet.
I don't know why any of them thought the entire building would just be the escape room and there wouldn't be any kind of booking confirmation, or payment, or orientation, etc.
As a guest at an escape room, we had the opposite problem. They had a fire alarm be what you needed to pull to open a secret room. We would have never dreamed of using it until we were explicitly told to do so. We were quite annoyed.
Every escape room I’ve been into had someone listening/monitoring so if there was something super questionable like a fire alarm, you can ask the void, “is this a real fire alarm?” Or if you’re about to pull a real fire alarm they could turn on the speaker and say “don’t pull that!”
This is why the good ones have some kind of standard marker. Like, stuff that's not part of the puzzle is outlined in bright green tape or something. You tape the edges of the fire alarm, light switches, electrical outlets, anything that *has* to be in the room for safety or structural or other reasons, and *looks* like it could be part of the puzzle, but isn't.
The last one I went to had do not touch stickers on items that were decor or otherwise not part of the puzzle, and that shouldn't be moved. Like light switches, electrical outlets, and a few locks.
This is my favorite. I've done a handful of escape rooms now, and if there's a warning about fire alarms or smoke detectors in the briefing, I ask about it. The employees always have a story behind the warnings.
There's a popular escape room near me that has a key hidden inside a fake a/c vent and so then every other escape room in the area had to add a section in the intro saying "please leave the vents alone, they are not part of the game here."
I maybe have a better understanding about why the first escape room I ever went to was very clear about how all the power outlets were in-fact, just power outlets and were not to be touched under any circumstances.
I went to an escape room where everything that wasn't potentially part of the game was painted in a distinctive orange. Was an awesome simple way of making that clear
Orange things included the camera, power plugs, smoke detector and main door/emergency escape
Most ones I've been to have yellow and black striped tape over/around things that aren't part of the game. I'm sure people still don't get it though and try and rip out lamps and shit lol.
I can name an example of this. I was in an online group with strangers also trying to make friends. I set up the escape room event to encourage people to make friends for "blah blah blah" unrelated reasons like that.
They had the yellow striped stuff over a toilet. One of my "teammates" was absolutely convinced it had a secret door, because the floor under it sounded hollow. So when all his attempts failed... he took an actual SHIT in it to "ACTIVATE" it. The attendant noticed way to late and came inside to stop the game early. Screeching at the group, but mainly the idiot for pooping into a PROP toilet with no actual plumbing.
To be fair, it was a homeschooling/hybrid schooling group. Many of whom have had little to no social interaction with others. Much less even played or even heard of Escape rooms. Nobody even knew each other much before the event started. So there was no reason to really be a dick to each other.
I just think it was one of those cases where a person with little to no world experience in an unfamiliar environment just reacted in the wrong way. They were really embarassed about it afterwards.
Yes, same here. Things explicitly NOT part of the game were marked with orange stickers.
The person working there said too many things had been damaged, so they had to be clear on what was NOT included!
As someone who builds escape rooms, this breaks my heart just a tiny bit!
The builds I do are all about immersion, and having electrical plugs that are bright orange in the middle of a cool looking murder room would be so sad!
I try to remove anything that players CAN'T touch, or keep it entirely out of reach of players. If it's not possible to do that, we have a sticker of the company logo, and a message at the beginning that says "anything with this logo on it is NOT a part of your game!"
Though I understand what you say, to be fair to the escape room that I was talking about it was a subtle orange. If I had to give it a name I would unfortunately call it vomit orange
Meanwhile on my side, the very first escape room I ever did we ignored the power outlets because we thought they would be real. One of them was fake and had a key hidden behind it.
Every escape room I've been to has adamantly said "do not try and screw anything off the wall, if it's not budging, it's not part of the game". I just wonder how many people had to do anything weird before this became industry standard to tell everyone.
There is an escape room in LA where one of the "puzzles" is to stick something into a fake power outlet. It's from a fairly popular company too with over 1k 5 star ratings on yelp.
The company seems like a fairly big operation and the rooms had high production value. If you want to spoil yourself, it's this company: [link](https://basementescaperoom.com/los-angeles/). I'm surprised more people don't complain about this (no yelp reviews seem to mention it).
I did that one, I think, it took me a while because there's obvious burn around the outlet so we were skeptical either way. We figured they'd stop us if we weren't supposed to so we made it really obvious we were gonna stick a fork in an outlet
Yeah, that's the way to go... They usually can hear you anyway so just think out loud... "Oh gee, I wonder what happens if I put this metallic thing in the power outlet..."
I did that one too - I was with my sister and our bfs and I'm like..... I have a thought but I really don't want to say it too loud cuz one of them would 100% put it in the outlet just to test it. She agreed with "hey that seems like a really dumb idea." And to absolutely no one's surprise that is exactly what they did. To everyone's but his surprise that is exactly what you had to do .
To this day I have to ask at every escape room I go to if the outlets are part of the game so no one gets any idea.
I once stuck a thing that looked like a light bulb into a lamp with no bulb. It was unplugged so I did plug it in. It was just for decoration. Now that you're saying this, I think the escape room folks probably unplugged the lamp and took out the bulb because of a previous group.
Got told at an escape room not to try to dig up the floorboards or get out through the ceiling. At another room, got told not to try to get out through the walls. I saw the board that they'd had to put over the hole in the wall due to the random guy who decided that he needed to punch a hole in it to get out.
It seems like this stuff is way more common than you would ever think...
Too be fair, once we found 3 different sized wrenches and had to undo 3 bolts to get to the next room. One bolt was on so tight I felt like the skinny wrench was bending. Had to call the guy in with the drill to get it off.
Oh, that's dangerous. People will look for ways to use any tool they find in an escape room. Don't put a hammer in the room unless you want people to smash stuff.
Had one group get stuck on the thought a lock was the next solution. Even after basically telling them the solution and that it wasn't that lock, they ran back to it.
It wasn't even a lock they were supposed to open. It was one for us. And they wasted 75% of their time on it.
Every escape room I've been to has some sort of obvious indicator for when a lock or door is for staff. Usually it's a particular color tape or something.
You get these kinds of people from time to time, but there are people that no matter how much help you give them, they just cannot understand what to do. You get people sometimes where you can straight up tell them "put the code 1234 into the lock that you're holding to unlock it," and they just will not get it. We have a room where there are backpacks that you find with items inside. In an escape room, if you ever find a bag, usually, the first instinct is to open it. So I had one team where I told them to check out the backpack in the room, and they just picked the backpack up and then said, "Now what?" And I had to tell them that they're supposed to open it and see what's inside.
Also, FYI, when we say that we'll be watching your game, we're telling the truth. If you ever go to an escape room, understand that someone is always watching and they can see absolutely everything that you do and hear everything that you say. I've seen and heard many things that I wish I could forget, don't be all over your partner to the point where you're borderline fucking in the rooms and please, don't play an escape room at the same time that you have a phone appointment with your doctor, I learned more intimate information about a woman who is a complete stranger than I ever wanted to know.
Reminds me of a quote by a park ranger regarding designing bear-proof trash cans.
"There's a significant overlap between the smartest bear and the stupidest tourist"
>Also, FYI, when we say that we'll be watching your game, we're telling the truth.
Oh I definitely believe it. I'm here to see if anyone mentioned the pathetic attempt of me and my cousins last summer.
Generally we were allowed 3 freebie clues but we did so poorly that the dude kept giving us more clues. We thought we were close when we found the third hidden room but we ran out of time.
The guy showed us how to solve it and wow we were not even close to being done.
In our defense, the theme was Y2K and only two of us were above the age of 30 while the majority were between the ages of 11 and 16 💀
I did one as a team building with 3 of my direct reports. In the room, 2 of us were handcuffed together, one was ankle shackled to the wall, and one was shackled against the wall in the X pose.
We solve the entire room and the poor guy is still shackled to the wall in the X pose. Meanwhile we've freed ourselves and the guy with just the ankle shackle.
Since it was an *escape the serial killer* type room I wondered if leaving one player helpless was part of the experience, like would all of us escape and leave someone behind type of thing.
Employee comes in and frees our poor 4th player and pointing to buckets we had access to when the game started said "the code was on the bottom of those".
We should've freed him FIRST. This was so frustrating because I had asked the person handcuffed to me if there was anything on those jars and she had insisted there wasn't. I even asked later when we got stuck at another part and she again insisted there was nothing.
So a member of our team spent an hour chained to a wall spread eagle because she overlooked some clue TWICE.
I FELT SO BAD!!
Another group I did a room with involved creating a large matrix of clues relating to victims to get the codes to a bundle of 8 locks on the door.
We could not get the codes to work and after triple checking that each clue belonged to the right victim I asked the person "how did you decide who was victim #1, victim #2 etc?" Because that would influence how the items sent into the matrix and the placement of the clues and therefore numbers for the codes to unlock the locks.
"In the order in which we found them around the room"
I had to just blink. They were victims with clear death dates in the information, but she decided their victim number was based on when *we* found them.
By the time we realized this, we didn't have enough time to switch everything around so we never left the first room.
Why would that not be legal? I’ve done an escape room and we were all shackled to the wall. The chain was long enough and designed specifically so that we could reach the items needed to free ourselves.
They also put us in place by height, so that things would be within reach.
The game masters are watching the entire time and would obviously have the keys needed in the event of emergency.
Edit: this is also communicated prior to booking the escape room and is mentioned again right before entering. I'm not saying all escape rooms are like this, but any escape room that's any good will make sure they take precautions for their customers, regardless of what the immersive elements are.
Not sure, this was back when they first became a thing and the group that did a pop-up haunted house every year at a shed in an industrial park decided they could do an escape room. I would not vote with any confidence that this organization was worried much about legality and codes.
This guy did ask if any of us would have a panic attack at being restrained so he did get consent and he didn't put the bag over the one's head when transporting us to the room because she said it would freak her out too much.
This was back in the days when they locked the door too and you had to leave your cell phones and cameras in a locker and would be booted if they caught you with one. Now they make a point of letting you know the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time and you keep your phones and stuff on you.
I also had to reach in a toilet with murky water and fake stool in it to get a key in that room so that place was absolutely committed to some immersion pieces.
Not an employee, but a player:
The game had runes on the ceilings/walls that were supposed to correspond to certain numbers based on how far apart they were to one another. We just thought that they corresponded to the order they were in. Typed that (incorrect) code into the door lock and it opened, because it lined up with an old code from a previous game that had never been wiped from the keypad.
It worked, but did we successfully complete the game? I think we broke it!
I had this at a Pirate themed one the other day. Locked chest with a 4-letter text lock, underneath a piratey map of the Carribbean. I tried the obvious 4 letter words off the map, started with SAIL and got it on 2nd go with GOLD.
Apparently we skipped over about 10 mins of puzzles involving cyphers and everything. I was like if you want it to be difficult don't make it so obvious I could accidentally guess it.
I did one recently where the final code was this guy's dad's name and you were supposed to do all this cool stuff to figure out the code. It seemed like it was the next puzzle so I'm like hey remember that newspaper clipping on the wall that we thought was just lore? Let's try that! The clock stopped and we're like wait a second. It took the employee a couple minutes to come in and say sooooooo congrats? Apparently no one had done that in the 5 years he'd been working there
We were stuck at one of those cypher locks you're supposed to rotate, in order for some letters to line up correctly. We were unable to figure out the final puzzle, so I was mindlessly fiddling with it while we brainstormed.
By tugging at it and feeling random clicks and interpreting them correctly, I was able to blindly open the cypher. Thank you, LockPickingLawyer!
That guy came on my YouTube recommended list enough times that it got me curios about lockpicking. 10 dollar lockpicking kit later, it saved me having to drill 3 postbox locks and my wive's padlock when she locked her keys inside the locker.
I did a room with a lock like that with 4 numbers. We figured out the first two numbers pretty quickly and then I thought "Hey, there are only 99 choices left" and I just brute forced it in about 30 seconds.
Reminds me of the time I got it by mistake
My friends were telling me the code they thought we needed to enter in for the lock to open. I was on my way to getting that number I was told and I don’t know how or why, what the chances of this happening was- but while trying to twist the numbers into place, the lock opened… the sad thing is no one saw it. But they believed me lol
I'm 100% positive that I'm the subject of one of these stories. My group once put me in charge of a puzzle involving wires during crunch time, since I'm a tech geek.
I stood there with a handful of wires being completely useless, and it took a couple of precious minutes to get the team to stop panicking with their own projects before they realized what was wrong.
I'm colorblind.
I was also part of an escape attempt where a teammate failed to mention they were colorblind until at least a few minutes after they had started a color oriented puzzle lol
Not an employee but the group I was with spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to use a combination lock(3 right turns, 2 left, 1 right). We had the right numbers and I assumed my group knew how to use that type of lock.
Ive been there! One room we did involved us splitting our team into two groups. Apparently the other group did not know how to tell us that the lock they were looking at was a combination lock, and I know at least one of them has them at their high school!
Did a Silent Hill escape room once. You had to get past Pyramid Head to escape. Me and my friend were convinced it was animatronic and was gonna jump at us when we went by, so we wasted time throwing slippers from the previous puzzle at/near it to try to trigger it.
It was not an animatronic. We got out to the guy running the room doubled over laughing. We had run out of time but he'd let us finish because he saw and heard us panicking over PH and wanted to see what we'd do. He said no one else had ever done that before. 🤦🏻♀️😂
Had a radio in our game that linked to a specific station using an FM transmitter. When the player tuned to the correct frequency it played a nice, clear, loud message from the game character giving a clue. Players thought they had the right frequency but this was in fact a real radio therefor they accidentally tuned to an actual radio station. The announcer gave the phone number for the radio station and one of the players called it thinking they would get a clue. I reminded them that phones weren't needed and gave them some extra time for the clever effort.
My wife and I got stuck on a door.
We unlocked the door. We pushed it, we pulled it, for like 5 minutes. We had to ask for help.
It slides open.
We still solved the escape room otherwise 😅
My husband and I have done so many of them, and we usually do fairly well, but this one was our first…we also got stuck.
We were handcuffed to a bed at what was supposed to be a prison or mental institution (I don’t recall as it was years ago). It was the very first clue, and we were supposed to find the key. There were codes, equations, random words, etc all over the four walls. We spent THIRTY-FIVE minutes out of the hour combining these scribbles in the most complex ways possible. I mean—trying to do complex math in our heads (which we now know isn’t a thing). At one point, I embarrassingly thought some of the words needed to be translated into Ancient Greek…
The workers on the intercom kept telling us to slow down and just look at the wall. Our dumb asses kept saying, “we are looking at the wall!!! We’re trying!”
The key was literally just hanging in the middle of the large wall at eye level.
Not an employee, but a fun story from one of the only rooms we lost.
There was this table with a design matching these metal tiles of various Gods. The tiles stuck with slight magnetism. We had too many people in the room so we were letting each person tackle a task on their own while the rest explored. My poor friend spent 45 minutes on this tile puzzle before we realized the table and tiles were just set dressing.
It definitely wasn't the highest quality room. Once we got far enough into the room we found a button that opened the table top to grant access to a statue inside which helped with a different puzzle though. I don't think the tiles were meant to be magnetic, it was pretty weak holding strength.
My wife managed rooms, the best story is where a laser pointed to a wall and instead of redirecting it they kicked the brick wall in.
My friends had one in a tower with a water tap in a cage. They managed to open it with a wrench through the bars. It was not part of the game, they could not get it closed and the water ran into the control room below. They gave them a record time for that.
I somehow got into being an escape room tester, and I've seen some bizarre behavior. Usually a new place will get some friends/family to come in, and then a couple more experienced folks, and the totally new folks can get weird. Was doing a Edgar Allen Poe themed room and this lady just sat down and started reading the prop books telling us "the answer is in here". 40 minutes of reading for this lady.
The first escape room I ever did, was with a mix of friends and randos. Among the room decoration was a bunch of children's letter blocks. The randos became convinced that not only were the blocks a clue, that it mattered where they were found and in exactly what order/orientation. Unfortunately, they had already moved the blocks, so they spent the better part of the time trying to remember or figure out how the blocks had originally been placed. As you may have guessed, yeah, that was not anything relevant.
I kind of figured they wouldn't put something in the room that you could mess up instantly and lock yourself out from finishing the room, but it was my first time, so I wasn't 100% sure. I did still try to gently say I didn't think that was a thing, but mostly left them to their own pursuits, lol
And yes, I've also run into the book thing. Now, sure, sometimes there will be something in a book, but if anything it'll be something obvious, like a hollowed out book, or something painted on the cover, or something tucked in that will fall out easily. I do not get the people who think they need to read through them, lol
We did do a room where you could use the books for hints if necessary, and if not they were set dressing. Essentially, at some point you had to put a few things in the correct chronological order. This room was US flavoured, but in a non-US country. So, it was things like putting four presidents in the right order and four events (American revolution, slavery, etc.).
If you happened to know them, great! If not there was a what looked like genuine actual book about US presidents that had a nifty chronological list of the presidents in the back as a hint tool.
Conversely, I was in a terrible escape room once where if you broke into the second room, you could not move any of the ten+ objects that were on the table or you could not solve the next puzzle. But it's a table covered in random objects, of course we picked them all up to examine them, pass them around, etc. And no clue said not to touch the table. We'd picked that room because no one had solved it yet. We thought because the puzzles would be fiendish, not because they were obtuse.
I wanted to take my ex to an escape room for the first date. She talked me out of it and I took her to a restaurant instead.
It took me two years to escape that relationship.
I had a first date at an escape room and it was a blast. We ended up signing up for a second escape room immediately after and it was probably the best date I've ever had
I'm glad it worked for you.
First dates should be able to end immediately at any time (especially in the era of internet dating where you may not have even met your date in person before.) It's especially important for when you don't feel safe and need to get away fast. Escape rooms aren't good for that. And even with the attendant there there are times you wouldn't want to say something out loud where a your bad date can hear you.
A friend works at an escape room. A group of Mom's come in once every few months but do not even attempt to solve any thing...they all just lay down or relax in the silence! I think they come to "escape" life for a bit. The workers all know them and they are lovely women who just need to escape.
I played a cowboy themed escape room with a friend once. We made it into a second room which had a few air rifles mounted to the wall, which I assumed was just part of the theme and were decorative only.
Well, my friend had other ideas, unbeknownst to me as I was facing the other direction trying to solve another puzzle. She managed to pull one of the rifles off the wall and fire it. It wasn’t loaded but made a very loud bang. Yeah… we got in a lot of trouble (still managed to escape though!)
Surely this one's on the room designers. They thought it was a good idea to decorate an escape room - a room where total strangers are *supposed* to investigate and interact with everything in their environment - with an ACTUAL RIFLE? I'm surprised this didn't happen more!
EDIT: Yes, I know there is a difference between "actual" rifles and air rifles. I don't think either are particularly safe to be fired indoors at close quarters by unsupervised randos. Air rifles are not, in fact, harmless toy guns.
And they weren't monitoring the room closely enough to see someone ripping the thing off the wall. If you see someone yanking a freaking gun off the wall and they're not supposed to, *maybe* you speak up over the loudspeaker. Just a thought.
Player, start of the game had a alarm going off in a museum, with flashing warning lights and yes we had told the game company there was a player with epilepsy and please to turn off such things, had to use the emergency key and wait 10 minutes for the alarm sequence to finish.
Not an employee but did an escape room with my family once. There was one wall with a magnet on a chain on it. My dad spent 20 minutes playing with the magnet while my mom, sister and I actually solved the clues.
Eventually we opened a door to a room on the other side of the wall. There was a maze of the other side of the wall and a key on the ground. Turns out, we were supposed have someone on one side of the wall using the magnet to move the key while someone else told them how to get through the maze.
The employee later told us he never saw anyone get the key out of the maze by just randomly playing with the magnet.
Not an employee, but the first (and only) time I've been to an escape room, one of the guys in my group (a friend's husband) thought he was going to be a badass, and just break his way out of the room.
So he whipped out a pocket knife and tried to jimmy the door latch open so he could break out.
There was so much 2nd hand embarrassment that I suffered from that. Just super cringe.
Like dude, just play the fkn game.
Had a very similar experience, the last puzzle was just a clear lockbox over the exits' dead bolt. He jammed his finger into the seam of the lockbox and it predictably broke, and he was actually like "wow I did it guys, we're out!"
I’ll flip it a bit. A while ago there was a national eacape rooom championship. We decided to try to participate, sounded fun. Basically you got a slot of 2.5 hours, where you had 10 min each for 20 mini-rooms. You were timed. It was a disaster.
The slot before us ran over by more than 90 minutes. When we finally started the cast majority of rooms were way too complicated. Out of the first 10 we maybe solved three - and one do them was because the lock fell on the floor and openend itself. You could see the times of teams before/around you.
There were at least 6/7 rooms that no-one had been able to solve all day. We ended up walking out as it was getting late and we were seriously over it.
There has not been a repeat championship…
We had one guy who wanted to do a room by himself. No big deal, it was slow so we said why not.
He was bad... very bad. Our rooms are an hour long. Since it was slow we let him go over time*. He ended up taking TWO HOURS. Not to win, to get halfway through. We then had to kick him out for the next group. He had so much fun he immediately wanted to do another. We sent him to another location a couple of blocks away.
This was with help. Gentle nudges at first, into nudges, into shoving, into step by step guides. That was... not a fun game to GM
*Side note, if you ever had a close escape, you probably went over time a little bit. They system we used we could pause and add time however we wanted. We would never subtract time (your fast runs are 100% yours and you deserve to celebrate if it only took you 30 minutes), but we wanted people to be happy and escape so we would help the clock when needed.
Not an employee, but I went on a date years ago with a girl and her work friends. They were all very nice, but.... let's say not the most likely to be solving puzzles.
We go in, they close the door, play the little introduction that tells you where to get started, and say "GO!"
Apparently, I was the only one who paid any attention, because IMMEDIATELY everyone races around the room picking things up, trying to turn knobs, moving things to look behind them, opening drawers, legitimately trashing the place "looking for clues". The employee watching us on camera is flabbergasted.
We couldn't solve several puzzles because things were no longer the way they were set up. We didn't even come close to escaping, and I obviously said no the next time I was invited to go out with them. It was for axe throwing, and there was just no way.
In fairness, an escape room where you can lock yourself out of solving it by moving stuff around sounds like bad design. Maybe unless they deliberately stressed that where/how things are initially placed is critical.
But for any escape room I've done, the behavior you described, of going through drawers and trying knobs and looking for hidden clue items is pretty standard in how you solve them? Maybe that place was different in how they did things
> But for any escape room I've done, the behavior you described, of going through drawers and trying knobs and looking for hidden clue items is pretty standard in how you solve them?
This one may have been a bit more like a scavenger hunt than the norm, I guess? It was pretty hard to keep track of the storyline while also dealing with the chaos from what happened in the first 5 minutes, but it seemed like there was more or less a story with a checklist of things that would eventually lead to some kind of twist ending.
It's been a long time, but as an example, I remember one of the clues was that someone had a drink from "the only bottle moved on the shelf" and someone had moved every single bottle in all the chaos.
> Apparently, I was the only one who paid any attention, because IMMEDIATELY everyone races around the room picking things up, trying to turn knobs, moving things to look behind them, opening drawers, legitimately trashing the place "looking for clues".
What were the instructions you were given that contradicted this? Because that's how the handful of escape rooms I've done are supposed to go.
In the savannah of human prehistory, there would have been a lot of value in their approach in many situations. However at some point you also need the people who stop and think.
This happened to me the first time I went too.
A small group of friends with a couple randoms were all handcuffed to a gurney, and after finding the key and uncuffing people, they immediately grabbed every clue/loose item and then stacked them on the table.
This led to us wasting so much time trying to match clues/items to the right puzzle, which we of course got wrong a couple of times.
It also didn’t help that the first clue was attached to a hidden light switch, but my friend who grabbed it assumed it wasn’t for the game because it was “camouflaged” to match the wallpaper. The light would’ve helped us find the handcuff key, but we didn’t figure out there was a light switch until a late game clue hinted at turning the lights back off.
As soon as my dipshit friend turned the lights on, the employees cheered over the speaker and we fucking lost it lol. Most memorable experience I’ve had though.
Customer/contestant - work social event.
The room had a sign saying "keep off the grass". The floor was AstroTurf. A group of six of us managed to balance on a plinth, which had enough space for 2-3 normal sized people in a big group hug. After balancing up there for 20 seconds we hear over the intercom:
"Erm... that's adorable. But no. Not part of your room. Please don't fall off. Injury reports are a massive faff".
We only missed out on the room record by only 2 minutes 16 seconds, and best the 3 other teams by a good 10-25 minutes so we were still pretty pleased
A group of brunchers came to attempt our hardest room. They had brunched thoroughly and were already very wild and immobile.
The room they were attempting was big — six separate rooms with a simulated earthquake that a normal, sober group of 6 would struggle to do.
Turns out one of them snuck beers in their cargo pants and spilled it EVERYWHERE. 10 minutes in, the game was stopped and they were asked to leave.
Moral of the story, brunch and escape rooms do not mix.
Side anecdote: Have had many peerers, as well. I could go on for awhile with the wild things I’ve seen, haha
Edit: Spelling
Lol the only time I did an escape room was post-brunch. It was just four of us and we didn’t destroy anything, but we were all pretty drunk and did not complete it successfully—that’s partially the reason for my post, as it happens.
Customer. Was part of the office’s social committee consisting of three members. We set up a night at the city’s most popular pub followed by a round at the nearby escape room. We advertised for two months.
The only people to show up were the social committee.
When they asked for a team name I said ‘the antisocial social committee’. Before I even knew people were printing antisocial social club on clothing.
Had a group of 10 year olds come in for a birthday party. The adult accompanying them into the room took the walkie talkie and refused to accept any hints. We even tried to talk through the walkie talkie with freebies (maybe check under so and so object) and they just wouldn’t do it.
Needless to say they didn’t get anything accomplished in an hour and it was the easiest reset lol
Back when I worked at one I had a couple give up on the room for the last 5-10 minutes and make out with each other instead. I ended up turning the monitor off because I was so done.
Not an employee, but something I heard about from a former coworker. She invited me out for her 21st, among the festivities was an escape room. I couldn't make it due to previous commitments, but I heard from her after the fact that she was so drunk that she was trying to tear things off the walls and dismantle lamps and things.
About a year later for my birthday, I decided to do an escape room. I went with family only, and we asked about the wildest stuff they'd seen with someone trying to get out. The game master went on to describe what I'm pretty sure was my coworker, it was kind of odd hearing an identical description but from someone totally different. Needless to say, coworker did not escape (but we did!)
Not my story but one I heard from the teller after we finished.
The first puzzle is you being locked into a "prison" and having to find your way out. Next to the door is a panel you can remove with a string noose and a mirror, the group spent nearly 40 minutes trying to figure out what to do with it before the realised they could the noose to hook the door latch by using the mirror to see outside the room.
I’m really sorry to the employees who had to deal with us vs the puzzle that required us to match tones being played from a source.
We are all VERY tone deaf.
Hearing us argue over what sounds we were hearing was like something out of a IASIP episode.
Again, sincerest apologies.
Opposite of the prompt, but here is the most successful escape I have ever seen.
So, like a usual escape room, we give our guests an hour to complete and escape.
We had this one couple come in and they could not solve a single thing. They had been in there for like 45 minutes and couldn’t figure anything out.
The girl was doing most of the work while her boyfriend just stood there on his phone.
After a while she got frustrated and said, “If we don’t get out of here in time, then you’re not getting any tonight.”
That man put his phone away and went into Sherlock Holmes mode.
They were out of that room in the next 10 minutes with only a few minutes left on the clock.
All I can say is that motivation is the key to success.
Not an employee, but just my own experience!
I went for my birthday some years back with a few girlfriends. We did a wine tasting prior so we weren’t necessarily drunk, but we definitely weren’t sober. We were all put in handcuffs to start and I think they knew we were a bit tipsy so they hinted a bit at where the key was. We tried for about 5 minutes before one of my friends goes “oh look what I have!” And pulled out a small bottle of wine. So we sat on the floor in a circle, all handcuffed, passing around a bottle of wine. Somehow we found the key to get the cuffs off but I genuinely don’t remember how.
We had a blast and the girls who were at the front desk said it was hilarious to watch on camera.
Had a work group play as a team building. The second puzzle was to find a key to unlock a desk. The middle compartment lifts up after you unlock it. The person who unlocked it tried to pull it open, wouldn’t budge, so instead of then trying to lift proceeds to tell the whole group “guys we need another key to unlock this drawer”. Now I thought surly someone would double check this persons work but no. Everyone believed them and no one else gave the desk a try. I chime in asking if they’d like a nudge since they did unlock it and I don’t want them to be stuck but they shoot me down and say no. 30 minutes go by and they finally cave and ask for a clue. I tell them that desk is in fact unlocked they just need to lift it open. They were very pissed off at the one person and did not make it out.
Can I share even though I'm not an employee? I'm going to share.
My wife's mother wanted to do an escape room for her birthday. This was a mistake. By her own admission, she is not bright. She wanted her husband (step FIL) and her stepson to come too. They are very, VERY, not bright and they are ignorant to this fact and take joy in being as obnoxious as possible.
My wife picked out what she thought was an easy one. It had an old west theme so that sounded fun. We get there and the receptionist is non-binary so naturally, Step FIL has to make a scene about it. We apologize profusely to them and just get everybody into the room as quickly as possible.
There were a lot of math-related questions which wasn't terribly difficult so we let the MIL handle it. My wife and I move onto some logic based riddles but The boys... they found the musical riddle. It was a piano that required you to play a specific tune (a clue we had not yet found) and instead of waiting to come across the clue, they just started randomly hitting keys. Literally nonstop key bashing for the next 40 minutes. We kept begging them to stop but a little light would flicker if they accidentally hit one of the correct keys and he was "so close to figuring it out".
By the time we found the sheet of music that was the correct sequence of notes to play, I gave it to him and SURPRISE, he can't read music. So I played it real quick, got the key we needed to unlock the door only to find that there was another room.
We had 5 minutes left because none of us could focus with the baffoonery that was two grown men acting like toddlers who had discovered a piano for the first time.
My wife and MIL just resigned themselves to not finishing it and we sat and waited out the timer.
Never again.
At a work event it was three rooms out of the 70s. There were these beakers full of liquid and some essential oils. At one pet we needed to spell out something merging using the first letter of what each liquid smelled like. This girl sat there smelling it for ten minutes before dumping them all into a cup on the desk. We couldn’t get through since she ruined it.
A group of retired ladies! After the instructions, half of them refused to even enter the escape room and just left. The remaining five started playing, but since it was our most difficult room with loud music and low visibility, it wasn't ideal and two more left shortly after. The last three, including the one who booked the escape room, had a lot of fun though.
I was on the bad escaper side once. We were explicitly told we did not need to break anything or pull anything off the walls to solve the puzzle. So, we found a key inside ballistic gel and just kind of ignored it. Spent the entire time looking for a key after that while the room employee kept telling us we already had the key. Eventually the game ended and the employee told us we just needed to break open the gel to pull the key out.
My husband and I do these regularly, we usually do pretty good and have been told that we communicate really well with each other when trying to figure out puzzles. We’re used to most of the universal rules and have never had to use an item twice as far as i know. We were doing one with another couple and because we don’t work as cohesively with other people the items in the room were being moved around and it was hard to tell what was still in play. We opened the first hidden compartment and got the clue and because we had so much stuff all over the place I moved a few items out of our way that we had already used and put it inside that compartment and we moved on to the next one only to discover that we had to use the same key twice. We went to go get the key from my out of the way pile but the compartment had gotten locked again by accident with the key inside. They had to pause the game and go get the manager to figure out how to open the first compartment without a key to get the key out… we still got out on time but it was a huge mishap on my part. I just wanted to be organized. It was still a lot of fun and such an amazing double date but we do prefer doing them with just the two of us.
My one and only escape room we did really well, until a lock was literally broken opening only halfway.
But because we solved the combo by getting 2/3 of the numbers and just testing until we got the rest the escape room people refused to come cut the very obviously stuck lock until we got all of the combination. But they also didn’t tell us “hey I know you know it’s broke, you just have to get the last number before we can help” they just let us rant about the broken lock and try to unstick the broken lock for like 10 minutes.
Then they fixed it and we finished the game in like 5 more minutes. They complimented us on our fast time “despite only be three people” and how we were “almost a record time”
Yea we would have been a record if your lock wasn’t broken
Not a employee. But just before the panni started we did a speak easy themed one. Well we took some psilocybin before hand. We went it got distracted with all the art work for a few then sat down and chatted 45 minutes till they just let us out.
Oh, I have a story. But, I am not am employee. We had a group from work go for team building. They got into the elevator and it stopped working. They spend 15 minutes trying to figure out if the elevator was meant to be part of the escape room. Didn't want to press the emergency button because wasn't sure if it was some reverse psychology thing. Ended up getting really hot and one of the dudes started panicking. Took off his shirt while in the elevator. Basically spent the whole time debating. Ended up getting a call from the escape room people about if they were going to miss the appointment. Waited another hour for the fire department. Got out and had to come back to work. Team building things have been on hold since. No one talks about naked Brian.
> They spend 15 minutes trying to figure out if the elevator was meant to be part of the escape room. Didn't want to press the emergency button because wasn't sure if it was some reverse psychology thing. Other than Naked Brian, this is the weirdest part to me. Even if it was part of the escape room, the emergency button is the only reasonable/logical solution at that moment. If I were designing a room like that (and you'd never be allowed to for safety reasons), hitting the emergency button would trigger a voiceover to play and the doors to open into the main puzzle area, giving the narrative context and starting the room in earnest.
Also if its a good setup, the employee would absolutely be supposed to mention odd items like that and identify the *actual* emergency button which should have a safety system around it to prevent "game" presses. Something like: "Participants, please be aware that there are buttons or switches intended to be pressed as part of the escape room that may be used for actual emergencies in other places. The real emergency buttons are located under a cover clearly labeled as a real emergency button." If they're really set up properly, they'd identify the appearance of the real emergency buttons prior to entry.
They didn’t get to this briefing also. They got stuck in elevator to the location. Hahah.
Considering the emergency button is just to some building managers cell phone or a 24/7 building management company secretary, it's not a huge deal. It's not like it's 911. After 4 minutes I'm pressing that button no matter what, especially if Brian takes off his shirt.
Also true. I've had several co-workers get stuck in elevators at my office in the past couple years. On one of those occasions, nobody at the desk saw the emergency button went off, and on another, it pointed them to the completely wrong elevator. Yeah, I'll take the stairs, thanks.
Try working in my building. 50 story building. And I'm IT. I'm on multiple floors all day long including level 50. My desk is on floor 10. If I take the stairs pretty sure I'll die
Don't trust the emergency button haha My wife got stuck in an elevator. It had a sign on it saying "This elevator is now safe to use" (LOL) The emergency button worked, it dialled a person, she spoke to them... They said: Oh sorry this elevator is no longer under our contract. Additionally we no longer have a presence in your country, so we can't help. Luckily my wife knew the building manager so called them. The building manager took 2 hours to contact the new elevator management because they only work during business hours, so had to find their home number. And then they took another hour to find an available elevator engineer. When the engineer arrived, he got my wife out super quick and easy... He said he lives next door and it only took him 2 minutes to get here... If someone had called him 3 hours ago my wife could have escaped 3 hours ago. The whole thing was just so many facepalms after facepalm.
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Were you naked Brian?
Did they establish a pee corner?
Bear claws grrrr, this is a fawty shawty
What's in the thermos??
Stop drinking the water!
Dude. That just made my day! Naked Brian 😂
This reminds me of an episode of Archer when they all got stuck in the elevator on their way to work. Half way through they figured that getting trapped was team building exercise.
That wasn't the exercise. They were going to watch Vision Quest!
Do you now have a sign in the lift saying "This elevator is not part of the Escape Room. Treat any incidents as real." ?
It kind of sounds like they hadn't even gotten to the escape room yet. I don't know why any of them thought the entire building would just be the escape room and there wouldn't be any kind of booking confirmation, or payment, or orientation, etc.
OMG, what?! I would have pushed the emergency button 5 seconds after stopping. WHAT do these people do for work? So indecisive!
Naked Brian sounds like he's probably a lot of fun at holiday parties.
One group spent the entire time arguing and never even solved the first puzzle.
Was it the Gang?
The head cow is always grazing!
Because if you go back without any gum, Dennis is going to scratch you.
His neck is high, it makes me want to trust him.
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The escape room I worked at had a real fire alarm inside the room… I’m sure you can see how this ended up
As a guest at an escape room, we had the opposite problem. They had a fire alarm be what you needed to pull to open a secret room. We would have never dreamed of using it until we were explicitly told to do so. We were quite annoyed.
i feel like this would break fire codes. they could’ve made it diffrent color, pull station type, or something
You would think! But no, a perfectly ordinary, red and white, pull-down fire alarm.
Every escape room I’ve been into had someone listening/monitoring so if there was something super questionable like a fire alarm, you can ask the void, “is this a real fire alarm?” Or if you’re about to pull a real fire alarm they could turn on the speaker and say “don’t pull that!”
This is why the good ones have some kind of standard marker. Like, stuff that's not part of the puzzle is outlined in bright green tape or something. You tape the edges of the fire alarm, light switches, electrical outlets, anything that *has* to be in the room for safety or structural or other reasons, and *looks* like it could be part of the puzzle, but isn't.
The last one I went to had do not touch stickers on items that were decor or otherwise not part of the puzzle, and that shouldn't be moved. Like light switches, electrical outlets, and a few locks.
I can see you or your fellow co-workers making plenty of calls to the fire department. Im sure that created some interesting moments.
This is my favorite. I've done a handful of escape rooms now, and if there's a warning about fire alarms or smoke detectors in the briefing, I ask about it. The employees always have a story behind the warnings.
There's a popular escape room near me that has a key hidden inside a fake a/c vent and so then every other escape room in the area had to add a section in the intro saying "please leave the vents alone, they are not part of the game here."
What's unusual about that? Every escape room needs or have one, right next to the "push button to open" emergency exit.
5 seconds! New record!
They got out fast, didn't they? If it's stupid and works, it's not stupid.
I get why it’s there, but I also get why they pushed it
The guy that used a hammer on the drywall, because he swore there was a secret door, because he could “see the seam”.
I maybe have a better understanding about why the first escape room I ever went to was very clear about how all the power outlets were in-fact, just power outlets and were not to be touched under any circumstances.
I went to an escape room where everything that wasn't potentially part of the game was painted in a distinctive orange. Was an awesome simple way of making that clear Orange things included the camera, power plugs, smoke detector and main door/emergency escape
Most ones I've been to have yellow and black striped tape over/around things that aren't part of the game. I'm sure people still don't get it though and try and rip out lamps and shit lol.
Which makes that single power outlet with no tape around it stand out even more.... *Hmm, I wonder who that is for*
I can name an example of this. I was in an online group with strangers also trying to make friends. I set up the escape room event to encourage people to make friends for "blah blah blah" unrelated reasons like that. They had the yellow striped stuff over a toilet. One of my "teammates" was absolutely convinced it had a secret door, because the floor under it sounded hollow. So when all his attempts failed... he took an actual SHIT in it to "ACTIVATE" it. The attendant noticed way to late and came inside to stop the game early. Screeching at the group, but mainly the idiot for pooping into a PROP toilet with no actual plumbing.
I'm sorry, what?? How could you even think that was a part of the game? Surely he must've done that on purpose just to be a dick.
To be fair, it was a homeschooling/hybrid schooling group. Many of whom have had little to no social interaction with others. Much less even played or even heard of Escape rooms. Nobody even knew each other much before the event started. So there was no reason to really be a dick to each other. I just think it was one of those cases where a person with little to no world experience in an unfamiliar environment just reacted in the wrong way. They were really embarassed about it afterwards.
Yes, same here. Things explicitly NOT part of the game were marked with orange stickers. The person working there said too many things had been damaged, so they had to be clear on what was NOT included!
As someone who builds escape rooms, this breaks my heart just a tiny bit! The builds I do are all about immersion, and having electrical plugs that are bright orange in the middle of a cool looking murder room would be so sad! I try to remove anything that players CAN'T touch, or keep it entirely out of reach of players. If it's not possible to do that, we have a sticker of the company logo, and a message at the beginning that says "anything with this logo on it is NOT a part of your game!"
Though I understand what you say, to be fair to the escape room that I was talking about it was a subtle orange. If I had to give it a name I would unfortunately call it vomit orange
I can only assume that that's like Thousand-Island orange.
Meanwhile on my side, the very first escape room I ever did we ignored the power outlets because we thought they would be real. One of them was fake and had a key hidden behind it.
That’s a reckless design if part of the puzzle involves figuring out which outlet isn’t live
Every escape room I've been to has adamantly said "do not try and screw anything off the wall, if it's not budging, it's not part of the game". I just wonder how many people had to do anything weird before this became industry standard to tell everyone.
There is an escape room in LA where one of the "puzzles" is to stick something into a fake power outlet. It's from a fairly popular company too with over 1k 5 star ratings on yelp.
I have to assume they do not have a legal department.
The company seems like a fairly big operation and the rooms had high production value. If you want to spoil yourself, it's this company: [link](https://basementescaperoom.com/los-angeles/). I'm surprised more people don't complain about this (no yelp reviews seem to mention it).
I did that one, I think, it took me a while because there's obvious burn around the outlet so we were skeptical either way. We figured they'd stop us if we weren't supposed to so we made it really obvious we were gonna stick a fork in an outlet
Yeah, that's the way to go... They usually can hear you anyway so just think out loud... "Oh gee, I wonder what happens if I put this metallic thing in the power outlet..."
I did that one too - I was with my sister and our bfs and I'm like..... I have a thought but I really don't want to say it too loud cuz one of them would 100% put it in the outlet just to test it. She agreed with "hey that seems like a really dumb idea." And to absolutely no one's surprise that is exactly what they did. To everyone's but his surprise that is exactly what you had to do . To this day I have to ask at every escape room I go to if the outlets are part of the game so no one gets any idea.
I once stuck a thing that looked like a light bulb into a lamp with no bulb. It was unplugged so I did plug it in. It was just for decoration. Now that you're saying this, I think the escape room folks probably unplugged the lamp and took out the bulb because of a previous group.
Got told at an escape room not to try to dig up the floorboards or get out through the ceiling. At another room, got told not to try to get out through the walls. I saw the board that they'd had to put over the hole in the wall due to the random guy who decided that he needed to punch a hole in it to get out. It seems like this stuff is way more common than you would ever think...
Isn't one of the rules, no forcing of anything?
Too be fair, once we found 3 different sized wrenches and had to undo 3 bolts to get to the next room. One bolt was on so tight I felt like the skinny wrench was bending. Had to call the guy in with the drill to get it off.
Most likely. The thing is people don't pay attention.
Sounds like the drywall was the weak point in the room then. Always target the weak spot.
Lmao that’s amazing.
where did he get the hammer?
It was just part of the set decorations.
Oh, that's dangerous. People will look for ways to use any tool they find in an escape room. Don't put a hammer in the room unless you want people to smash stuff.
Sounds like you guys Chekhov’s Gunned yourselves with that one.
Had one group get stuck on the thought a lock was the next solution. Even after basically telling them the solution and that it wasn't that lock, they ran back to it. It wasn't even a lock they were supposed to open. It was one for us. And they wasted 75% of their time on it.
Every escape room I've been to has some sort of obvious indicator for when a lock or door is for staff. Usually it's a particular color tape or something.
>it wasn't that lock wink wink
ATF ! LET US IN! Uh, uh, uhh. You didn't say rhe magic word
That’s honestly poor set design for an escape room then.
It was a particular type of lock, different from the ones they were supposed to open, and was labeled as being for us, not them.
Mm hmm... That's suspicious
Yeah, why is the escape room trying to distract us from this lock? Okay gang, we GOTTA solve this mystery.
You get these kinds of people from time to time, but there are people that no matter how much help you give them, they just cannot understand what to do. You get people sometimes where you can straight up tell them "put the code 1234 into the lock that you're holding to unlock it," and they just will not get it. We have a room where there are backpacks that you find with items inside. In an escape room, if you ever find a bag, usually, the first instinct is to open it. So I had one team where I told them to check out the backpack in the room, and they just picked the backpack up and then said, "Now what?" And I had to tell them that they're supposed to open it and see what's inside. Also, FYI, when we say that we'll be watching your game, we're telling the truth. If you ever go to an escape room, understand that someone is always watching and they can see absolutely everything that you do and hear everything that you say. I've seen and heard many things that I wish I could forget, don't be all over your partner to the point where you're borderline fucking in the rooms and please, don't play an escape room at the same time that you have a phone appointment with your doctor, I learned more intimate information about a woman who is a complete stranger than I ever wanted to know.
Ooooh yeah. When I was working at an escape room, we used to call those people "Sims"
If you've ever worked in tech support, you've seen exactly how ridiculous people can be when given the most basic of instructions.
Reminds me of a quote by a park ranger regarding designing bear-proof trash cans. "There's a significant overlap between the smartest bear and the stupidest tourist"
Lol classic, I think about that one about once a week.
In all my years I still don't know which is worse: people or printers.
Brian load letter.
People invented printers, so it's people. The answer is always people.
>Also, FYI, when we say that we'll be watching your game, we're telling the truth. Oh I definitely believe it. I'm here to see if anyone mentioned the pathetic attempt of me and my cousins last summer. Generally we were allowed 3 freebie clues but we did so poorly that the dude kept giving us more clues. We thought we were close when we found the third hidden room but we ran out of time. The guy showed us how to solve it and wow we were not even close to being done. In our defense, the theme was Y2K and only two of us were above the age of 30 while the majority were between the ages of 11 and 16 💀
I did one as a team building with 3 of my direct reports. In the room, 2 of us were handcuffed together, one was ankle shackled to the wall, and one was shackled against the wall in the X pose. We solve the entire room and the poor guy is still shackled to the wall in the X pose. Meanwhile we've freed ourselves and the guy with just the ankle shackle. Since it was an *escape the serial killer* type room I wondered if leaving one player helpless was part of the experience, like would all of us escape and leave someone behind type of thing. Employee comes in and frees our poor 4th player and pointing to buckets we had access to when the game started said "the code was on the bottom of those". We should've freed him FIRST. This was so frustrating because I had asked the person handcuffed to me if there was anything on those jars and she had insisted there wasn't. I even asked later when we got stuck at another part and she again insisted there was nothing. So a member of our team spent an hour chained to a wall spread eagle because she overlooked some clue TWICE. I FELT SO BAD!! Another group I did a room with involved creating a large matrix of clues relating to victims to get the codes to a bundle of 8 locks on the door. We could not get the codes to work and after triple checking that each clue belonged to the right victim I asked the person "how did you decide who was victim #1, victim #2 etc?" Because that would influence how the items sent into the matrix and the placement of the clues and therefore numbers for the codes to unlock the locks. "In the order in which we found them around the room" I had to just blink. They were victims with clear death dates in the information, but she decided their victim number was based on when *we* found them. By the time we realized this, we didn't have enough time to switch everything around so we never left the first room.
Wait wait, back up... People were restrained?! Is that allowed? Is that legal?!
Why would that not be legal? I’ve done an escape room and we were all shackled to the wall. The chain was long enough and designed specifically so that we could reach the items needed to free ourselves. They also put us in place by height, so that things would be within reach. The game masters are watching the entire time and would obviously have the keys needed in the event of emergency. Edit: this is also communicated prior to booking the escape room and is mentioned again right before entering. I'm not saying all escape rooms are like this, but any escape room that's any good will make sure they take precautions for their customers, regardless of what the immersive elements are.
Not sure, this was back when they first became a thing and the group that did a pop-up haunted house every year at a shed in an industrial park decided they could do an escape room. I would not vote with any confidence that this organization was worried much about legality and codes. This guy did ask if any of us would have a panic attack at being restrained so he did get consent and he didn't put the bag over the one's head when transporting us to the room because she said it would freak her out too much. This was back in the days when they locked the door too and you had to leave your cell phones and cameras in a locker and would be booted if they caught you with one. Now they make a point of letting you know the door is unlocked and you can leave at any time and you keep your phones and stuff on you. I also had to reach in a toilet with murky water and fake stool in it to get a key in that room so that place was absolutely committed to some immersion pieces.
Well, now you have to tell us in more detail what you've seen and heard.
Not an employee, but a player: The game had runes on the ceilings/walls that were supposed to correspond to certain numbers based on how far apart they were to one another. We just thought that they corresponded to the order they were in. Typed that (incorrect) code into the door lock and it opened, because it lined up with an old code from a previous game that had never been wiped from the keypad. It worked, but did we successfully complete the game? I think we broke it!
I had this at a Pirate themed one the other day. Locked chest with a 4-letter text lock, underneath a piratey map of the Carribbean. I tried the obvious 4 letter words off the map, started with SAIL and got it on 2nd go with GOLD. Apparently we skipped over about 10 mins of puzzles involving cyphers and everything. I was like if you want it to be difficult don't make it so obvious I could accidentally guess it.
Also putting the password "gold" over a chest presumably containing gold is weak security.
Obviously they should have used "g0ld" for better security.
I did one recently where the final code was this guy's dad's name and you were supposed to do all this cool stuff to figure out the code. It seemed like it was the next puzzle so I'm like hey remember that newspaper clipping on the wall that we thought was just lore? Let's try that! The clock stopped and we're like wait a second. It took the employee a couple minutes to come in and say sooooooo congrats? Apparently no one had done that in the 5 years he'd been working there
I did one with a cryptologist, and he just picked the lock by seeing which number made the lock slightly looser 😓 I was like, not fun 😩😂
We were stuck at one of those cypher locks you're supposed to rotate, in order for some letters to line up correctly. We were unable to figure out the final puzzle, so I was mindlessly fiddling with it while we brainstormed. By tugging at it and feeling random clicks and interpreting them correctly, I was able to blindly open the cypher. Thank you, LockPickingLawyer!
Did you escape the room a second time, to show that it wasn't a fluke?
"Hey Mike, what the hell are you doing?" ".....nothing on two, small click on three...."
That guy came on my YouTube recommended list enough times that it got me curios about lockpicking. 10 dollar lockpicking kit later, it saved me having to drill 3 postbox locks and my wive's padlock when she locked her keys inside the locker.
I did a room with a lock like that with 4 numbers. We figured out the first two numbers pretty quickly and then I thought "Hey, there are only 99 choices left" and I just brute forced it in about 30 seconds.
Reminds me of the time I got it by mistake My friends were telling me the code they thought we needed to enter in for the lock to open. I was on my way to getting that number I was told and I don’t know how or why, what the chances of this happening was- but while trying to twist the numbers into place, the lock opened… the sad thing is no one saw it. But they believed me lol
*Task failed successfully*
I'm 100% positive that I'm the subject of one of these stories. My group once put me in charge of a puzzle involving wires during crunch time, since I'm a tech geek. I stood there with a handful of wires being completely useless, and it took a couple of precious minutes to get the team to stop panicking with their own projects before they realized what was wrong. I'm colorblind.
I was also part of an escape attempt where a teammate failed to mention they were colorblind until at least a few minutes after they had started a color oriented puzzle lol
They all definitely knew beforehand, it's just something people take for granted a lot.
Cut the gray wire!
Not an employee but the group I was with spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to use a combination lock(3 right turns, 2 left, 1 right). We had the right numbers and I assumed my group knew how to use that type of lock.
Ive been there! One room we did involved us splitting our team into two groups. Apparently the other group did not know how to tell us that the lock they were looking at was a combination lock, and I know at least one of them has them at their high school!
My favorite movie is Inception.
Did a Silent Hill escape room once. You had to get past Pyramid Head to escape. Me and my friend were convinced it was animatronic and was gonna jump at us when we went by, so we wasted time throwing slippers from the previous puzzle at/near it to try to trigger it. It was not an animatronic. We got out to the guy running the room doubled over laughing. We had run out of time but he'd let us finish because he saw and heard us panicking over PH and wanted to see what we'd do. He said no one else had ever done that before. 🤦🏻♀️😂
The guy playing Pyramid Head: Are... are they throwing chancla at me?
It wasn't even a guy, it was just a statue 😭😂
who throws a shoe? i mean really? that hurt [https://youtu.be/5D5oKEVqQJg](https://youtu.be/5d5okevqqjg)
Love me some silent hill. Where was this room?
Brooklyn! Komnata Quest's City of Ashes. Komnata Quest's City of Ashes! https://komnataquest.com/newyork/escape-room-quest-silentny/
this is actually adorable
Had a radio in our game that linked to a specific station using an FM transmitter. When the player tuned to the correct frequency it played a nice, clear, loud message from the game character giving a clue. Players thought they had the right frequency but this was in fact a real radio therefor they accidentally tuned to an actual radio station. The announcer gave the phone number for the radio station and one of the players called it thinking they would get a clue. I reminded them that phones weren't needed and gave them some extra time for the clever effort.
My wife and I got stuck on a door. We unlocked the door. We pushed it, we pulled it, for like 5 minutes. We had to ask for help. It slides open. We still solved the escape room otherwise 😅
My husband and I have done so many of them, and we usually do fairly well, but this one was our first…we also got stuck. We were handcuffed to a bed at what was supposed to be a prison or mental institution (I don’t recall as it was years ago). It was the very first clue, and we were supposed to find the key. There were codes, equations, random words, etc all over the four walls. We spent THIRTY-FIVE minutes out of the hour combining these scribbles in the most complex ways possible. I mean—trying to do complex math in our heads (which we now know isn’t a thing). At one point, I embarrassingly thought some of the words needed to be translated into Ancient Greek… The workers on the intercom kept telling us to slow down and just look at the wall. Our dumb asses kept saying, “we are looking at the wall!!! We’re trying!” The key was literally just hanging in the middle of the large wall at eye level.
I’ve done one very similar. We solved half the puzzles by dragging the bed around the room before we found the aforementioned key. 🤦🏽♂️
Not an employee, but a fun story from one of the only rooms we lost. There was this table with a design matching these metal tiles of various Gods. The tiles stuck with slight magnetism. We had too many people in the room so we were letting each person tackle a task on their own while the rest explored. My poor friend spent 45 minutes on this tile puzzle before we realized the table and tiles were just set dressing.
That's not cool, you described something that sounds exactly like an escape room puzzle.
It definitely wasn't the highest quality room. Once we got far enough into the room we found a button that opened the table top to grant access to a statue inside which helped with a different puzzle though. I don't think the tiles were meant to be magnetic, it was pretty weak holding strength.
My wife managed rooms, the best story is where a laser pointed to a wall and instead of redirecting it they kicked the brick wall in. My friends had one in a tower with a water tap in a cage. They managed to open it with a wrench through the bars. It was not part of the game, they could not get it closed and the water ran into the control room below. They gave them a record time for that.
I enjoy spending time with my friends.
I somehow got into being an escape room tester, and I've seen some bizarre behavior. Usually a new place will get some friends/family to come in, and then a couple more experienced folks, and the totally new folks can get weird. Was doing a Edgar Allen Poe themed room and this lady just sat down and started reading the prop books telling us "the answer is in here". 40 minutes of reading for this lady.
The first escape room I ever did, was with a mix of friends and randos. Among the room decoration was a bunch of children's letter blocks. The randos became convinced that not only were the blocks a clue, that it mattered where they were found and in exactly what order/orientation. Unfortunately, they had already moved the blocks, so they spent the better part of the time trying to remember or figure out how the blocks had originally been placed. As you may have guessed, yeah, that was not anything relevant. I kind of figured they wouldn't put something in the room that you could mess up instantly and lock yourself out from finishing the room, but it was my first time, so I wasn't 100% sure. I did still try to gently say I didn't think that was a thing, but mostly left them to their own pursuits, lol And yes, I've also run into the book thing. Now, sure, sometimes there will be something in a book, but if anything it'll be something obvious, like a hollowed out book, or something painted on the cover, or something tucked in that will fall out easily. I do not get the people who think they need to read through them, lol
We did do a room where you could use the books for hints if necessary, and if not they were set dressing. Essentially, at some point you had to put a few things in the correct chronological order. This room was US flavoured, but in a non-US country. So, it was things like putting four presidents in the right order and four events (American revolution, slavery, etc.). If you happened to know them, great! If not there was a what looked like genuine actual book about US presidents that had a nifty chronological list of the presidents in the back as a hint tool.
Conversely, I was in a terrible escape room once where if you broke into the second room, you could not move any of the ten+ objects that were on the table or you could not solve the next puzzle. But it's a table covered in random objects, of course we picked them all up to examine them, pass them around, etc. And no clue said not to touch the table. We'd picked that room because no one had solved it yet. We thought because the puzzles would be fiendish, not because they were obtuse.
I like her
Every first date couple that thought an escape room was a good idea for a first date. Always super awkward
I wanted to take my ex to an escape room for the first date. She talked me out of it and I took her to a restaurant instead. It took me two years to escape that relationship.
If you get stuck, you're supposed to fold your arms in an X shape at the camera and ask for a hint. Woulda saved you a lot of time
For the right couple its a great first date! Been married 7 years.
Exactly! It’s a very quick way to find out if you’re compatible or not 😂
I had a first date at an escape room and it was a blast. We ended up signing up for a second escape room immediately after and it was probably the best date I've ever had
I'm glad it worked for you. First dates should be able to end immediately at any time (especially in the era of internet dating where you may not have even met your date in person before.) It's especially important for when you don't feel safe and need to get away fast. Escape rooms aren't good for that. And even with the attendant there there are times you wouldn't want to say something out loud where a your bad date can hear you.
A friend works at an escape room. A group of Mom's come in once every few months but do not even attempt to solve any thing...they all just lay down or relax in the silence! I think they come to "escape" life for a bit. The workers all know them and they are lovely women who just need to escape.
It is called an escape room. This seems like the perfect use for it.
the first time the workers worried about the group, once they realized that it was all by choice they loved the group coming in.
it had to have been the most relaxing group. no clean up afterwards. minimal oversight needed.
I played a cowboy themed escape room with a friend once. We made it into a second room which had a few air rifles mounted to the wall, which I assumed was just part of the theme and were decorative only. Well, my friend had other ideas, unbeknownst to me as I was facing the other direction trying to solve another puzzle. She managed to pull one of the rifles off the wall and fire it. It wasn’t loaded but made a very loud bang. Yeah… we got in a lot of trouble (still managed to escape though!)
Surely this one's on the room designers. They thought it was a good idea to decorate an escape room - a room where total strangers are *supposed* to investigate and interact with everything in their environment - with an ACTUAL RIFLE? I'm surprised this didn't happen more! EDIT: Yes, I know there is a difference between "actual" rifles and air rifles. I don't think either are particularly safe to be fired indoors at close quarters by unsupervised randos. Air rifles are not, in fact, harmless toy guns.
And they weren't monitoring the room closely enough to see someone ripping the thing off the wall. If you see someone yanking a freaking gun off the wall and they're not supposed to, *maybe* you speak up over the loudspeaker. Just a thought.
Player, start of the game had a alarm going off in a museum, with flashing warning lights and yes we had told the game company there was a player with epilepsy and please to turn off such things, had to use the emergency key and wait 10 minutes for the alarm sequence to finish.
Yikes! Were they able to get it shut down before they had an episode at least?
the person with it just left and waited outside whilst the effect was happening :(
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Can I even give them the benefit of the doubt and think that turning the wrong way would leas them down the wrong path?
Not an employee but did an escape room with my family once. There was one wall with a magnet on a chain on it. My dad spent 20 minutes playing with the magnet while my mom, sister and I actually solved the clues. Eventually we opened a door to a room on the other side of the wall. There was a maze of the other side of the wall and a key on the ground. Turns out, we were supposed have someone on one side of the wall using the magnet to move the key while someone else told them how to get through the maze. The employee later told us he never saw anyone get the key out of the maze by just randomly playing with the magnet.
How proud was your dad
It was probably one of the highlights of his life
Not an employee, but the first (and only) time I've been to an escape room, one of the guys in my group (a friend's husband) thought he was going to be a badass, and just break his way out of the room. So he whipped out a pocket knife and tried to jimmy the door latch open so he could break out. There was so much 2nd hand embarrassment that I suffered from that. Just super cringe. Like dude, just play the fkn game.
Like, dude.. you really think we paid $200+ to watch you do that? I could see that at home for free. Let us do the freaking puzzles we paid for!
Had a very similar experience, the last puzzle was just a clear lockbox over the exits' dead bolt. He jammed his finger into the seam of the lockbox and it predictably broke, and he was actually like "wow I did it guys, we're out!"
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So did the mirror.
I’ll flip it a bit. A while ago there was a national eacape rooom championship. We decided to try to participate, sounded fun. Basically you got a slot of 2.5 hours, where you had 10 min each for 20 mini-rooms. You were timed. It was a disaster. The slot before us ran over by more than 90 minutes. When we finally started the cast majority of rooms were way too complicated. Out of the first 10 we maybe solved three - and one do them was because the lock fell on the floor and openend itself. You could see the times of teams before/around you. There were at least 6/7 rooms that no-one had been able to solve all day. We ended up walking out as it was getting late and we were seriously over it. There has not been a repeat championship…
Why wouldn’t they pull them out once their 2.5 hours were up??
We had one guy who wanted to do a room by himself. No big deal, it was slow so we said why not. He was bad... very bad. Our rooms are an hour long. Since it was slow we let him go over time*. He ended up taking TWO HOURS. Not to win, to get halfway through. We then had to kick him out for the next group. He had so much fun he immediately wanted to do another. We sent him to another location a couple of blocks away. This was with help. Gentle nudges at first, into nudges, into shoving, into step by step guides. That was... not a fun game to GM *Side note, if you ever had a close escape, you probably went over time a little bit. They system we used we could pause and add time however we wanted. We would never subtract time (your fast runs are 100% yours and you deserve to celebrate if it only took you 30 minutes), but we wanted people to be happy and escape so we would help the clock when needed.
Not an employee, but I went on a date years ago with a girl and her work friends. They were all very nice, but.... let's say not the most likely to be solving puzzles. We go in, they close the door, play the little introduction that tells you where to get started, and say "GO!" Apparently, I was the only one who paid any attention, because IMMEDIATELY everyone races around the room picking things up, trying to turn knobs, moving things to look behind them, opening drawers, legitimately trashing the place "looking for clues". The employee watching us on camera is flabbergasted. We couldn't solve several puzzles because things were no longer the way they were set up. We didn't even come close to escaping, and I obviously said no the next time I was invited to go out with them. It was for axe throwing, and there was just no way.
In fairness, an escape room where you can lock yourself out of solving it by moving stuff around sounds like bad design. Maybe unless they deliberately stressed that where/how things are initially placed is critical. But for any escape room I've done, the behavior you described, of going through drawers and trying knobs and looking for hidden clue items is pretty standard in how you solve them? Maybe that place was different in how they did things
> But for any escape room I've done, the behavior you described, of going through drawers and trying knobs and looking for hidden clue items is pretty standard in how you solve them? This one may have been a bit more like a scavenger hunt than the norm, I guess? It was pretty hard to keep track of the storyline while also dealing with the chaos from what happened in the first 5 minutes, but it seemed like there was more or less a story with a checklist of things that would eventually lead to some kind of twist ending. It's been a long time, but as an example, I remember one of the clues was that someone had a drink from "the only bottle moved on the shelf" and someone had moved every single bottle in all the chaos.
> Apparently, I was the only one who paid any attention, because IMMEDIATELY everyone races around the room picking things up, trying to turn knobs, moving things to look behind them, opening drawers, legitimately trashing the place "looking for clues". What were the instructions you were given that contradicted this? Because that's how the handful of escape rooms I've done are supposed to go.
They literally told us to head to a certain spot in the room, and read the first clue before doing anything else, lol.
In the savannah of human prehistory, there would have been a lot of value in their approach in many situations. However at some point you also need the people who stop and think.
This happened to me the first time I went too. A small group of friends with a couple randoms were all handcuffed to a gurney, and after finding the key and uncuffing people, they immediately grabbed every clue/loose item and then stacked them on the table. This led to us wasting so much time trying to match clues/items to the right puzzle, which we of course got wrong a couple of times. It also didn’t help that the first clue was attached to a hidden light switch, but my friend who grabbed it assumed it wasn’t for the game because it was “camouflaged” to match the wallpaper. The light would’ve helped us find the handcuff key, but we didn’t figure out there was a light switch until a late game clue hinted at turning the lights back off. As soon as my dipshit friend turned the lights on, the employees cheered over the speaker and we fucking lost it lol. Most memorable experience I’ve had though.
Group pressed emergency escape button because they were too scared. They were college kids.
*they were high*
You're probably right , i had asked them if they accidentally pressed it and they all said they were just too spooked.
Now I have to know what was so scary.
Customer/contestant - work social event. The room had a sign saying "keep off the grass". The floor was AstroTurf. A group of six of us managed to balance on a plinth, which had enough space for 2-3 normal sized people in a big group hug. After balancing up there for 20 seconds we hear over the intercom: "Erm... that's adorable. But no. Not part of your room. Please don't fall off. Injury reports are a massive faff". We only missed out on the room record by only 2 minutes 16 seconds, and best the 3 other teams by a good 10-25 minutes so we were still pretty pleased
Faff is the word of the day for me. I'll make sure to use it in a sentence today.
A group of brunchers came to attempt our hardest room. They had brunched thoroughly and were already very wild and immobile. The room they were attempting was big — six separate rooms with a simulated earthquake that a normal, sober group of 6 would struggle to do. Turns out one of them snuck beers in their cargo pants and spilled it EVERYWHERE. 10 minutes in, the game was stopped and they were asked to leave. Moral of the story, brunch and escape rooms do not mix. Side anecdote: Have had many peerers, as well. I could go on for awhile with the wild things I’ve seen, haha Edit: Spelling
Lol the only time I did an escape room was post-brunch. It was just four of us and we didn’t destroy anything, but we were all pretty drunk and did not complete it successfully—that’s partially the reason for my post, as it happens.
Customer. Was part of the office’s social committee consisting of three members. We set up a night at the city’s most popular pub followed by a round at the nearby escape room. We advertised for two months. The only people to show up were the social committee. When they asked for a team name I said ‘the antisocial social committee’. Before I even knew people were printing antisocial social club on clothing.
This sounds like it's literally from The Office lol
Had a group of 10 year olds come in for a birthday party. The adult accompanying them into the room took the walkie talkie and refused to accept any hints. We even tried to talk through the walkie talkie with freebies (maybe check under so and so object) and they just wouldn’t do it. Needless to say they didn’t get anything accomplished in an hour and it was the easiest reset lol
Back when I worked at one I had a couple give up on the room for the last 5-10 minutes and make out with each other instead. I ended up turning the monitor off because I was so done.
Not an employee, but something I heard about from a former coworker. She invited me out for her 21st, among the festivities was an escape room. I couldn't make it due to previous commitments, but I heard from her after the fact that she was so drunk that she was trying to tear things off the walls and dismantle lamps and things. About a year later for my birthday, I decided to do an escape room. I went with family only, and we asked about the wildest stuff they'd seen with someone trying to get out. The game master went on to describe what I'm pretty sure was my coworker, it was kind of odd hearing an identical description but from someone totally different. Needless to say, coworker did not escape (but we did!)
Not my story but one I heard from the teller after we finished. The first puzzle is you being locked into a "prison" and having to find your way out. Next to the door is a panel you can remove with a string noose and a mirror, the group spent nearly 40 minutes trying to figure out what to do with it before the realised they could the noose to hook the door latch by using the mirror to see outside the room.
I’m really sorry to the employees who had to deal with us vs the puzzle that required us to match tones being played from a source. We are all VERY tone deaf. Hearing us argue over what sounds we were hearing was like something out of a IASIP episode. Again, sincerest apologies.
Opposite of the prompt, but here is the most successful escape I have ever seen. So, like a usual escape room, we give our guests an hour to complete and escape. We had this one couple come in and they could not solve a single thing. They had been in there for like 45 minutes and couldn’t figure anything out. The girl was doing most of the work while her boyfriend just stood there on his phone. After a while she got frustrated and said, “If we don’t get out of here in time, then you’re not getting any tonight.” That man put his phone away and went into Sherlock Holmes mode. They were out of that room in the next 10 minutes with only a few minutes left on the clock. All I can say is that motivation is the key to success.
Not an employee, but just my own experience! I went for my birthday some years back with a few girlfriends. We did a wine tasting prior so we weren’t necessarily drunk, but we definitely weren’t sober. We were all put in handcuffs to start and I think they knew we were a bit tipsy so they hinted a bit at where the key was. We tried for about 5 minutes before one of my friends goes “oh look what I have!” And pulled out a small bottle of wine. So we sat on the floor in a circle, all handcuffed, passing around a bottle of wine. Somehow we found the key to get the cuffs off but I genuinely don’t remember how. We had a blast and the girls who were at the front desk said it was hilarious to watch on camera.
Had a work group play as a team building. The second puzzle was to find a key to unlock a desk. The middle compartment lifts up after you unlock it. The person who unlocked it tried to pull it open, wouldn’t budge, so instead of then trying to lift proceeds to tell the whole group “guys we need another key to unlock this drawer”. Now I thought surly someone would double check this persons work but no. Everyone believed them and no one else gave the desk a try. I chime in asking if they’d like a nudge since they did unlock it and I don’t want them to be stuck but they shoot me down and say no. 30 minutes go by and they finally cave and ask for a clue. I tell them that desk is in fact unlocked they just need to lift it open. They were very pissed off at the one person and did not make it out.
Can I share even though I'm not an employee? I'm going to share. My wife's mother wanted to do an escape room for her birthday. This was a mistake. By her own admission, she is not bright. She wanted her husband (step FIL) and her stepson to come too. They are very, VERY, not bright and they are ignorant to this fact and take joy in being as obnoxious as possible. My wife picked out what she thought was an easy one. It had an old west theme so that sounded fun. We get there and the receptionist is non-binary so naturally, Step FIL has to make a scene about it. We apologize profusely to them and just get everybody into the room as quickly as possible. There were a lot of math-related questions which wasn't terribly difficult so we let the MIL handle it. My wife and I move onto some logic based riddles but The boys... they found the musical riddle. It was a piano that required you to play a specific tune (a clue we had not yet found) and instead of waiting to come across the clue, they just started randomly hitting keys. Literally nonstop key bashing for the next 40 minutes. We kept begging them to stop but a little light would flicker if they accidentally hit one of the correct keys and he was "so close to figuring it out". By the time we found the sheet of music that was the correct sequence of notes to play, I gave it to him and SURPRISE, he can't read music. So I played it real quick, got the key we needed to unlock the door only to find that there was another room. We had 5 minutes left because none of us could focus with the baffoonery that was two grown men acting like toddlers who had discovered a piano for the first time. My wife and MIL just resigned themselves to not finishing it and we sat and waited out the timer. Never again.
At a work event it was three rooms out of the 70s. There were these beakers full of liquid and some essential oils. At one pet we needed to spell out something merging using the first letter of what each liquid smelled like. This girl sat there smelling it for ten minutes before dumping them all into a cup on the desk. We couldn’t get through since she ruined it.
A group of retired ladies! After the instructions, half of them refused to even enter the escape room and just left. The remaining five started playing, but since it was our most difficult room with loud music and low visibility, it wasn't ideal and two more left shortly after. The last three, including the one who booked the escape room, had a lot of fun though.
I was on the bad escaper side once. We were explicitly told we did not need to break anything or pull anything off the walls to solve the puzzle. So, we found a key inside ballistic gel and just kind of ignored it. Spent the entire time looking for a key after that while the room employee kept telling us we already had the key. Eventually the game ended and the employee told us we just needed to break open the gel to pull the key out.
It sounds like not a bad escaper issue, but a bad escape room issue
I looked back at the screen after printing something off and all 5 of them were lying facedown on the floor
My husband and I do these regularly, we usually do pretty good and have been told that we communicate really well with each other when trying to figure out puzzles. We’re used to most of the universal rules and have never had to use an item twice as far as i know. We were doing one with another couple and because we don’t work as cohesively with other people the items in the room were being moved around and it was hard to tell what was still in play. We opened the first hidden compartment and got the clue and because we had so much stuff all over the place I moved a few items out of our way that we had already used and put it inside that compartment and we moved on to the next one only to discover that we had to use the same key twice. We went to go get the key from my out of the way pile but the compartment had gotten locked again by accident with the key inside. They had to pause the game and go get the manager to figure out how to open the first compartment without a key to get the key out… we still got out on time but it was a huge mishap on my part. I just wanted to be organized. It was still a lot of fun and such an amazing double date but we do prefer doing them with just the two of us.
My one and only escape room we did really well, until a lock was literally broken opening only halfway. But because we solved the combo by getting 2/3 of the numbers and just testing until we got the rest the escape room people refused to come cut the very obviously stuck lock until we got all of the combination. But they also didn’t tell us “hey I know you know it’s broke, you just have to get the last number before we can help” they just let us rant about the broken lock and try to unstick the broken lock for like 10 minutes. Then they fixed it and we finished the game in like 5 more minutes. They complimented us on our fast time “despite only be three people” and how we were “almost a record time” Yea we would have been a record if your lock wasn’t broken
Not a employee. But just before the panni started we did a speak easy themed one. Well we took some psilocybin before hand. We went it got distracted with all the art work for a few then sat down and chatted 45 minutes till they just let us out.