Escape From Alcatraz: Maximum Security

Hated that this room couldn’t decide a theme. Half aliens half zombie, literally designed so you fail, which doesn’t make it fun!

My least favorite escape room that I’ve done. It’s giving “please just pick a theme” vibes as it is prison mixed with weird mutant alien stuff. One person starts in an isolation cell while everyone else is in a big cell. I volunteered to be in the isolation cell because I was told there would be stuff for me to do while the others worked to get me out, but there really wasn’t (you find one thing quickly that will be used later, nothing to actively do in the cell until your teammates activate something), so I just sat there bored and annoyed for the first 15 minutes. Things aren’t intuitive. And they said it’s basically made so you purposely don’t get out (our GM said the last group to escape built and worked in escape rooms).

I thought this escape room was too hard honestly. There were puzzles that we solved correctly and couldn’t figure out the code or next steps. Also there were parts where we weren’t sure if we were doing the correct thing because it felt like we were gonna break something.

We loved the start of the room, but it seemed like the theme kept changing. Part of the game if we didn’t get it in a clue would have felt like cheating lol. A lot of the locks just seemed so used up, like even once you had the right numbers in it would only open after trying a bunch of times.

Lost with one puzzle to go because the girl on three walkie talkie couldn't figure out what clue we needed. Spent an easy 10 min just talking with her on the walkie talkie walking her through where we were in the room and felt like she was just looking through a checklist of things to ask us...

I really liked the difficulty of this room when I played it back in 2021. This was one where I actually didn’t escape the first time but came back and escaped in round 2. Some good instances where you really need to think outside of the box. There were parts that you could tell were really worn down so hopefully they replaced those items.

Rooms should have been better up kept. Parts of old challenges remained that were bad distractions. The GM even said that usually you start in different rooms but heating/cooling did not work well and changed this. Puzzles were poorly designed and not cleanly executed. Experience was a not good. Sad because we took newer people with us they were also very disappointed

You can tell the room has been repurposed/redesigned from something else as there a things that were left that could act as red herrings, but they just don’t fit and actually take away from the ambiance of the room. Not bad, but many elements also somewhat broken or didn’t function as anticipated and game master was not aware of where we were when asking for assistance.