Houdini's Workshop

Staff are amazing. But the gameplay is a bit all over the place. It’s not one puzzle after the next. It’s all at once, so you get confused about which clues are for which lock. Also, too many locks.

Surprisingly good for a room that used so many master locks. The only issue we had was with a couple unfun red herrings. For one, there are differently colored pins on one of the locks, but this isn’t a clue, despite there being several color-based puzzles in the room.

The upsides: some very fun and creative puzzles, surprisingly challenging (might be the closest I’ve cut an escape), and the staff is very nice and cool (shoutout to the guy with the dipper pines hat). The downsides: a couple red herrings (one of them quite major) that really threw us off (and I personally am against red herrings in rooms in general). Also, there’s a 5 letter lock that is multicolored (three different colors across the 5 letters), but it’s not puzzle related, it’s because they replaced pieces of the lock multiple times… which was really confusing. Lastly, there was one double clue (an item where the text was reused) which was kind of confusing since generally in an esc room once something is used, it’s done. Anyways, overall a really fun time!

Logical puzzle and highly immersive atmosphere

I really wanted to like this room, but it didn't live up to the hype. Most of the puzzles in the room were fine, but there was a huge red herring in the room that will confuse and frustrate many players. There doesn't seem to be any reason why this was included, other than to waste players' time. There was also a moment where I had the answer to a puzzle, but could not unlock the lock because you are meant to open it by pushing the lock down rather than up. I wish this had been communicated in the room briefing as it was something that clearly stumped other players. I feel these issues could have been addressed quite easily via the GM, but I felt as though my GM was absent for significant portions of the game, giving me clues to puzzles that I had already solved when I got stuck. Gameplay issues aside, the concept/theme of the room is good, but the decorations and lighting are underwhelming and there was no sense of immersion.

I was hesitant to book this room because of some of the reviews, but I’m so glad I did. We had so much fun! There are a lot of master locks, but they thought of very unique ways to discover each code so it never felt boring or redundant. We absolutely loved our game master, Casey! He was full of energy and made our experience even more fun! We will definitely be back to try their other rooms.

I’ve only done a dozen or so escape rooms but Houdini places second to last. To begin, our host was a very, very nice man who came across way too strong. He essentially yelled the rules at us and made us all very uncomfortable. This was his way of being fun and energetic but it was just off putting. Then we get into the room and it’s a bunch of master locks. That’s fine for 2015 but there’s so many great rooms out there, paying $50 a head to do master locks is not great. In addition, this room is Houdini themed, in the sense that there’s four clues that are vaguely magic related. In my opinion, these are puzzles that have a magic paint scheme, rather than magic puzzles. Even then, there were a few puzzles I thought were fun and well designed, but even more that were busy work or frustratingly misleading. Now the good stuff: our host didn’t mean to be rude, he meant to be fun but there’s just a communication issue. The lobby is lovely and was an excellent place to wait for the game to start. If I was going to get yelled the rules, that couch was a great, comfortable spot to do it. You can book a private experience! $50 a head wouldn’t be bad, if the game was more interesting.

I really enjoyed this one! Very straightforward, everything made sense and still felt decently challenging. There were some very fun mechanisms too

This was a fun room! Great interaction with the game master. The puzzles are all unique with some fun flashy outcomes. We enjoyed as a team of 3!

Pretty cool room with some fun magic tricks. I appreciated that all the locks clearly had illustrations on them to indicate which puzzle solved them. There was one that I felt was pretty unintuitive, but the rest were great.