The House of Specter

Definitely a room you should try to see if in the northern suburbs of Chicago, or even the Chicagoland area. The set design was great, some of the best in the area, with everything from floor to ceiling feeling integrated into the theme. Every room was high quality. The puzzles were solid, with a good variety of difficulty. A few things felt under-clued or ambiguous, but we were able to get through all but one puzzle without hints just through trial and error. It wasn’t too much of an issue. There was a booklet of sorts that had a lot of info and tended to bottleneck, so I don’t think this room would be good for 4 or more people. There was one prop that was so unpolished and messy that it was impossible to understand and we needed a clue. The special effects were well done and the feedback on puzzle inputs was appreciated, as were the very bright flashlights which made sure the difficulty was only derived from the puzzles and not from the darkness. The GM and owner is amazing, super friendly and awesome overall.

Loved the set design and our GM was great, but, overall, I did not enjoy this game. The puzzles did not flow together well for me and I sometimes felt like they were from a different story.

I CANNOT RECOMMEND THIS ENOUGH! Johnathon was amazing and it was a great experience. An amazing game master and a truly awesome game. Tough puzzles mixed with great critical thinking. High recommend the room.

Great set, animatronics, and spooky atmosphere! The puzzles themselves are not super intuitive, and so they end up more frustrating than not. There is a booklet guide for pretty much the entire room, and I feel like understanding how anything worked would be extremely difficult without that book. It’s also super dark, which is understandable, but our flashlights were also breaking down and not super bright. Darkness isn’t a puzzle, but here it felt like it was a battle against it just to see basic clues. The GM was very helpful in walking us through to the end, because there was no way in hell we were getting there as a group of 2 within 60 minutes. (By the way, the timer is an hourglass.) I enjoyed my time, and the finale was super cool. It’s a fun experience for the Halloween season, which is when we did it. The esoteric puzzles made us feel dumb, though. Owners were super nice and came up to our car to ask how the room was. We’re looking forward to seeing more of what this company has to offer still!

Amazing set and animatronics, the story was interesting and a lot of the puzzles were fun and challenging. A couple of the puzzles had props that needed some work or better definition for their puzzles and a couple things that could just use more instruction for the order of inputs. Our "hunt guide" was nice but overstepped with clues and was walking us through parts of the room unprompted which was a bit disappointing. Overall good experience but seeing as this room just opened a few days ago, there are still a couple wrinkles that could be smoothed out.