Kidnapping 2: Afraid of the Dark

This experience starts off in complete darkness. As your eyes adjust to the lack of light, you use your sense of touch for the first couple puzzles. After that, you unlock a couple small lights that you have to share or continuously press in order to see a variety of locks (both key locks and letter locks). A couple of the items were pretty cool, I liked the ending “puzzle” that was a compilation of all the items you found previously. The storyline itself was a bit lackluster - a kidnapper you’ve encountered before captures you again and…. Gives you an hour to play his game and get out. The room itself was also very sparsely decorated which, for a chain like Breakout who killed it with the Clue set, felt a bit lackluster to me. One item (no spoilers!) was used multiple times for different clues - which makes sense when you’ve got such an empty room, but most escape rooms only have you use an item once for a clue, so it did lead to us spinning our wheels a few times. The only complaint I had was that the ending color lock had several of the same color (that you needed to use) and even when we were told which ones to press, it didn’t unlock and we had to just keep entering it until it unlocked. Which was extra puzzling since they had just built this room in the last month or so when we played, so it isn’t an issue of old technology. Overall, this was definitely a decent experience. Probably wouldn’t be the one I’d recommend the most at Breakout (That’s be Clue), but nothing unique to write home about either. I’d rate it low on the side of like.

Rating 2/5 The room was mediocre at best, but I did like the darkness aspect as I haven't done anything like that before. At the beginning, it's not pitch black, there's just enough light so that you don't run into each other but not enough light to read. I feel like there were some missed opportunities to add more creative puzzles that require feeling/touching things. There were a couple of interesting puzzles but I wasn't a fan of the room being only padlocks and number pads. It was also only a single room, nothing new to discover, and the story was almost non-existent. The main reason for the thumbs down is that this is a brand new room released this year and there's no reason they should be designing a room that is this basic (Gen1) in 2024, I would've liked this room more in 2014. The room was not scary unless you are specifically scared of the dark, there are no jump scares. Since the room is small with not a lot to do, I'd recommend 2-4 players. I've played almost all the rooms at this Breakout location, my personal ranking starting with my favorite: 1. Clue ❤️ 2. Museum Heist 👍 3. Bomb Squad/Undercover Alley 👍 4. Submarine Survival 👍 5. Mystery Mansion 👍 6. Runaway Train 👎 7. Kidnapping 2 👎 8. Island Escape 👎 9. The Kidnapping 👎

Dark and fun. Great Flow challenging but very doable.