An incredibly ambitious immersive theater-meets escape room experience. Production design is top tier, maybe the best of any ER I’ve done. The story was fascinating , inventive and involved. Maybe TOO involved. One could argue there was perhaps too much exposition and it got in the way of the gameplay at times. But I’d rather an experience er on the side of too much story rather than not enough. The puzzles were great for the most part, but I do have one complaint. There were WAY too many puzzle “instructions.” In fact, almost every puzzle had a piece of parchment that explained how the puzzle work. At least they tried to make the instructions fit with the story, but for the most part it just got in the way and slowed things down. Certainly not the type of ER where you could just follow through it, doing puzzles in an intuitive sequence. That said, it’s a small complaint in an otherwise stunning experience, with no detail too small. Truly rich and imaginative.
I feel bad not giving this top marks for gameplay because the gameplay is kind of 2nd fiddle to the story and immersion, both of which were next level. That said, I need to be honest about the puzzles. Some of them were pretty rough. Many were great! But many were overly complicated or required leaps of logic that just didn’t make sense. And the reading. Ohhhhh boy the reading. I get that he creators are going for an extremely narrative-driven room, and at that they succeed. But even if you strip the story away, too many of the puzzles are bogged down by what I would describe as “puzzle instructions.” Pieces of parchment that were required just to know what to do or how to start a puzzle. This is not fun. It is quite tedious. And it happened way too often. Luckily the “proctors” are extremely liberal with hints, and boy will you need plenty.
One of the best, if not THE best environments and immersion of any escape room I’ve done. Period.
Particularly interesting or different
Yes
This right here is the secret sauce of Heresy. A mind blowing sense of storytelling and immersion for an escape room. And not to spoil anything, but choices you make along the way can affect the way the rest of the experience plays out.
Excellent, fascinating story. One small complaint: it was a bit of information overload. I admire the depth of the story it was telling, and I will take that any day over and Escape Room without a story at all. The exposition was a little bit heavy though, and sometimes took away from the fun. Not in a dealbreaker kind of way, Just in a way that could’ve used some fine-tuning imo.
As someone who has done about 100 Escape Rooms, I have to admit, this room is unbelievably difficult. Unfortunately, a lot of the difficulty comes from Puzzle design that requires some serious logic leaps, and or extremely tedious instruction reading.
My kind of spooky! Was not “horror” themed, but definitely creepy/spooky at times. Would not bring young kids.
This is a key part of the experience. Plan on being up close and personal with a live actor for most of the experience. But this is all part of the fun and story.
Physically active
Not at all