Scooby-Doo and the Spooky Castle Adventure

Rating: 3.5/5 Above average room overall and better than most rooms in the Indy area. Pros: -Strong Scooby Doo theming and appropriate story, I think Scooby fans will enjoy the room -Decent tech integration, not a lot of padlocks -Helpful, friendly game master -Multiple rooms -Nice variety of puzzles, though they weren't particularly interesting Meh: -Immersion/set could've been better, didn't quite feel like we were in a castle -No real memorable moments or reveals Cons: -A couple puzzles had issues and needed to be manually activated by the game master -Some puzzles had descriptions on how to solve them, I'm not a fan of this since it takes away from the immersion and usually just means the puzzle isn't intuitive enough -A key needed to be used more than once. I've never used a key more than once in ~80 rooms so we needed help for the game master to figure that out. -The price of the room is too high for what you get, it's higher priced than this same room at other locations in larger cities, fortunately we used a discount code for weekday games. Difficulty felt about right for our group of 3 (only used 1-2 clues), would be doable with 2 experienced enthusiasts. 5-6 would be too many.

Escapology is in a strip mall with plenty of parking. The interior is so cool with some comfy seating and small puzzles to try your hand at prior to going back for your escape room experience. We had a couple items break - one thing that was supposed to drop a key didn’t and a few latches that were supposed to be triggered weren’t. The GM was able to come in the room and correct it for us, but definitely took a bit away from the game play. There was also one key that opened two different locks with no notice in the game that it was reused (we had to use a hint because we were stuck that just told us to reuse the same key). The set itself was AWESOME. It was so immersive, it really felt like you were in a Scooby-Doo episode and there was a mixture of high tech clues (doors being automatically unlocked, holding a clue up to a box to start a video) and regular lock boxes. The puzzles themselves were pretty interesting! We had a group of 3 adults and we didn’t feel like the puzzles were too hard to crack, so I feel like kids could also reasonably play this room with adults and have a blast. Several of the puzzles had “how to” guides on how to play - this could be a plus or minus depending on what you like out of an escape room. I liked that we didn’t have to sit and spin our wheels on how to use the clues we had, but will admit it did take a little away from the immersive aspect. It had no effect on the ranking for me, personally. There were some flow issues - there would be a game in one room that you wouldn’t be able to complete until you got some items from a room you opened later. Overall, I consider this a solid “like.” I think the game was unique and interesting (especially as a Scooby Doo fan), but some of the technical issues caused it to not be a full love.