Public Library

Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card. Well, ok, it can be challenging even with a library card at this escape room. To its credit, most of the room was fine, even if it’s a small experience revolving around looking at a bunch of books and trying to figure out which of the many keypads the codes go in. However, the final puzzle soured me. Not because it was hard. The opposite, actually. I solved it in a valid way first try within a few minutes, but it wasn’t… “right.” Now I can admit if I did the puzzle wrong. But my team looked at it forwards and backwards and we had a valid solution. The puzzle clues were written in an incorrectly vague way, and they were actually looking for a specific other solution. So after 12 minutes of claiming we had it right, we asked for a hint anyway. The gamemaster, who didn’t really seem to care or know what the puzzle actually was, told us (probably from an answer key) that one component of the puzzle had to be a certain way, which was definitely not in the original cluing. Long story short, even though we escaped with lots of time to spare in this short room, we still didn’t feel validated… Shame because I was having fun til the end. This was also the only room we wanted to do that wasn’t fully BOOKed.