Walkers

(I was an employee of this escape room location, but challenged this room before working there. This is an archival review. The room and location no longer exist.) Walkers was an awful room. I can't be more straightforward than that. The entire thing felt like a rushjob to capitalize on the already fading popularity of a TV show and dumped out for the Halloween season. Most everyone I knew, challengers and employees alike hated everything about this room and one even wanted to contact the fire marshall due to the way it was designed. I'll go through the basic experience, start to finish without giving away the answers, not that that matters anymore. You start the room in (nearly) total darkness, despite whoever decided the monitor background needed to be bright white. (I recall it was done to provide more light, which defeats the purpose of the lantern and the "starting in total darkness.") One participant was given a lantern and chained to the wall with an actual full locking, non trick handcuff. The rest were locked in a cage of chainlink fencing with a padlock holding the door shut. (it wasn't until much later that both locks were attached to quick release carabiners in the event the players needed to leave for an emergency.) The starting experience forced you into a single puzzle, that was as cerebral as solving a Where's Waldo book in the back of a car at night. This also forced the progression of the room on ONE person, while the rest stood around in the zoo enclosure, twiddling their thumbs until the handcuffed player located the code scratched on the doorframe behind them. Once the cage was unlocked and the rest of the people you brought are finally allowed to play the game as well, you can turn on the lights, or be a tryhard and leave them off, to see the walls scrawled in esoteric nonsense and the names of characters for the show, and a clue for a puzzle that isn't used until the very last part of the game. The mid level puzzles werent the worst. Some were easy to figure out how they related to other puzzles, and nearly all fell into "find the code for the box" as the room consisted of nearly 10 locks in total, with only one "pseudo-magnetic puzzle" (The puzzle didn't work and was activated by the game master after the correct arrangement was seen on camera. Well over half the puzzles were "find code for a locked box just hiding somewhere in the room." with the rest being simple puzzles that resulted... in a code for a locked box. I often use the term "box and locks" for an escape room that hinges mostly on this kind of puzzle design, and lacks more technologically advanced features. This isn't inherently a bad thing, as one could nearly say the same for Dr. Tyknee's Lab, but it's all in the approach. But when I say Walkers in a "box and locks" room, I very much mean that as a disparaging remark. Every puzzle hinged on this design so heavily, that opening one of these locked boxes would present you with EVEN MORE locked boxes. Sometimes 2 or 3! It felt less like an escape room and more like opening an incredibly secure matroyshka doll. The feeling of solving a puzzle should feel rewarding, but if your "reward" for opeing a locked box is getting another locked box, it's disheartening and tiring. One of the least useful hints was a hexagon with a number inside it, It was easy to match that to one of the bolts you found in a locked box, but there was little else given about it. The solution was to somehow know it was a fake bolt. with a message hidden inside of it when you twisted off the top from the body of the bolt. IOnce I was hired there, I decided to add three curved arrows around the hexagon clue to make it a little more logical to come to the "unscrew the bolt" conclusion. The final "escape door" was a psyche-out, where opening the door revealed a brick wall, with a keypad, FINALLY requiring the use of that clue you were given at the beginning of the game. Ignoring that annoyance, it was a pretty cool "twist" unless you were looking at single digit minutes on your clock and assumed you were done. Using that code opened a VERY SMALL door that you had to physically crawl out of to officially escape. I attached that hint to the brick wall itself to allievate the pain of getting a seemingly useless clue you'll likely forget about by the time it's required. The escape rate wasn't great if the game master wasn't sympathetic to the group, or the group itself was insistant on not getting hints. It was an embarrasing blight on the otherwise, fairly charming and unique puzzles that Great Escape was normally known for. But don't worry, it can't hurt us any more.