The Hex Room

My personal favorite. Good for larger groups like 6+. Highly recommended

A very unique experience! great for big groups. Cross Roads never disappoints.

The Hex Room begins by splitting you up. One moment, you’re a group of friends; the next, you’re archetypes locked in separate rooms, cast into a low-budget horror flick where the killer is watching and you need to solve dual sets of puzzles to survive. You are the Jock, the Rebel, the Nerd, The Prom Queen, The Virgin. Each role comes with its own puzzles, its own narrative, its own locked room. Then there’s a detective, stranded in the middle trying to hold the strands together. You shout through walls. You pass clues. You trust each other without seeing each other. But The Hex Room isn’t just meta-fun, it’s flat out, have an amazing time fun! Like The Breakfast Club with bloodstains. Other rooms may offer more spectacle, or dazzle with more tech, intricate puzzles, and stronger narratives, but that’s not the point. The Hex Room is engineered for joy. And our team of five loved it.

Incredible set design and a unique style of gameplay. Definitely a creepy room and had some scary elements. Molly was it fantastic game master and really kept the flow of the room without too much stagnation. Five people - escaped and survived with 11 minutes to spare.

Best escape room in OC

Such a fun premise, and such a fun room! I loved how everyone got their own space to work on stuff and how it all came together. The theme and the decor was top notch!

I never really play large group games, mostly out of inability. Lab Rat in Austin was an exception that ultimately required game-breaking measures to help alleviate. So to finally have enough players for a room I’ve always wanted to do, especially the perfect number, was incredibly exciting. The Hex Room more than lived up to expectations. Even after a decade of age in an industry that’s always rapidly evolving, The Hex Room is unique and joyful. It didn’t need a ton of tech, or shocking transitions that define the best of the best now. It simply creates a gameplay style all in its own that’s just as different as I can imagine it would have been to play it in 2015. Each room has individual moments and collective moments, heroic triumphs and moments where you can simply assist. Our team of both beginners and experienced players all had a great time, and save for one intense moment, never felt overly pushed by the room itself into genuine fear or frustration. It’s replayable, but it’s also a once in a lifetime experience to engage with such a unique game design - I never felt disappointed about missing out on anything, and will never play it the same way again. This was punctuated with a light coat of parody that gave the rooms (and by extension the collective experience) a purpose and overarching mood. It was not particularly serious, but it was also not a joke. Escape rooms are collective experiences. It’s rare for a game to both heavily lean into this while also giving so much weight to the individual. Whatever you end up being, you get an experience that’s both yours and also deeply shared. The Hex Room presents an alternative to many current premium rooms - instead of using game design to accentuate the narrative or themes, the game design itself actually becomes the core theme almost invisibly. There isn’t a complicated narrative or even a real coherent individual narrative, but much like the films it lovingly references it uses archetypes to tell a deeply felt narrative about overcoming obstacles despite fundamental differences in personality and social status. I actually think the experience affected me more than some more emotionally driven games - because in spite of the lack of defined “story” the players end up creating their own narrative through these shared yet individual moments. To hear first time players talk excitedly about what they had to overcome while also experiencing those moments as an observer made me feel like I just played my first game. To have teammates who usually take a backseat solve puzzles on their own made me feel less like the reason we were playing and more like an ensemble character. It’s hard to do this room if you’re not from the area. It’s a miracle I could even do it. But if you can, especially with 6 people, this is one of the finest examples of seamless game design I have ever seen in an escape room.

We have been looking forward to this room for so long, and it definitely didn't disappoint! If you haven't heard of this room, what are you doing? The theming is super immersive, and I love that everyone gets their own costume pieces. Having the extra element of the hex box also made for a unique added bonus. Niko was our game master and was perfect! Our group is fairly experienced, so we like to avoid clues when we need them. Niko made sure that we only got nudges if we absolutely needed them, which is highly appreciated! I think my favorite part was their spreadsheet afterwards that tracked which rooms and puzzles are the most difficult (total nerd alert). Thank you so much for a wonderful and personable experience! I will definitely be back!

Such a fun room, great for a big group. Nico was fantastic and friendly. The props and atmosphere were very immersive. Can’t wait to try the other rooms here