Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express

This is probably one of the most difficult escape rooms I have ever done and overall did not enjoy this room. My enjoyment is directly tied to Escapology employees seemingly not paying attention to what we were doing. Our gamemaster asked us if we wanted free clues, we said "No, but if we are getting behind just let us know" so that we know to ask for one if we want to. She agreed to this and well they just never did this, so we thought we were doing fine, then all of a sudden they started sending us multiple clues back to back to back (over the course of 5 minutes). As someone who works at an escape room this is a clear sign that we were REAALLLLYYY far behind and they were just trying to get us to a certain point, which felt frustrating because for some puzzles we didn't even get to attempt them before being rushed to the next part. A few puzzles we were on the right track, doing it right, but a clue was sent to seemingly get us moving. We definitely were supposed to be at a certain point 20 minutes ago and they weren't paying attention to get us on the right track earlier. A lot of puzzles involve at least 3 elements and it was overwhelming at points. The final puzzle did not work when we did the correct order. I give the employees credit that they did give us extra time and even paused our time so we could complete (once again it seemed like they knew that we struggled for far too long and were trying to make sure we at least had a good experience). We probably spent 5 minutes on the final puzzle before it eventually worked. We mentioned it to the worker and she said "yeah it's finnicky", not her fault, but shows it's a known issue. Very frustrating especially for the final puzzle of the room!

I’m a fan of Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot, and Murder on the Orient Express (both the book and the movie), so I’m a little biased into liking this room. However, it did also have its issues. My favorite part is downright solving the mystery, and as a huge mystery buff, I loved the logic puzzles involved in solving this case (which by the way is not the same case as the book proper). But some of the puzzles leading before it are annoying to say the least. One of the puzzles took us about 20 minutes, just because we couldn’t completely understand what exactly the room wanted us to do. We tried multiple ways until we realized we did it right the first way and just mixed up 2 numbers because of the vagueness of the puzzle itself. It would have been nice to have nudges for this one, which we said were ok beforehand. Instead we had to press the hint button several times while the GM tried to figure out what part we needed help with. Had we not been train wrecked by these 1st few puzzles, I would have much more enjoyed the mystery to come and would have had more time to solve it. Set wise, the first room was fun with a video of the outside as the train chugs along. The further in you go, the less it resembles an actual train. Much of the decorations, even important clues, are cheap paper wall stickers, which are disappointing with regards to immersion. I still would say this train ride is fun for mystery buffs and fans of the source material, but other less-enthused players may not even want to get a ticket. I much prefer this location’s Scooby Doo escape room for mystery fun.

We really want to like this because we are fans of Agatha Christie. The set design was nice in the first room, but the game play was awful. It is very linear from the start so a group would not have fun. We made it to the end and the last puzzle, which just turned into a time waster matching game. A lot of the puzzles made no sense or were just not fun to solve at all.

We loved the book so we were excited to check this escape room out! Of course as luck would have it, we picked the absolute hardest room at this company as our first visit here. 😖 It was fun nevertheless! Very hard, but we felt rusty not having done an escape room in a long time. 😅 We really appreciated the game masters giving us a few extra minutes to finish the room! 🙏🏼 We’ll definitely be back for the other rooms! Thank you!