Chocolate Factory

Enjoyable theme, appears to be an older room as many props are worn, but still useable. Multiple layers/rooms within the experience and compounding puzzles/clues. Overall enjoyable, but could use a refresh/fix-up.

I played this a couple of years ago (I think back in 2021,) and as an avid fan of Willy Wonka, this was a great time! Although only the first room really captures the essence of a chocolate factory, but all of the rooms do give the wacky feeling you get from the films. Although not all of the puzzles were entirely fitting to the theme and the way you actually win is a little bit unclear and strange, this is still a fun, mostly easy room that I'd love to go back and try again. Out of the 19 escape rooms I've played at the time of writing, this one ranks 12th - which is not to say it's bad or below average by any means. | UPDATE AFTER PLAYING AGAIN: Some of the puzzles were easier than others, but overall the room was a half decent challenge. I'm fairly certain that they're slowly just letting the room fall apart, though, as there's no way they didn't lose a bunch of a specific prop from last time. In addition, things were reset in the order they needed to be placed, and some of those things popped open prematurely anyway. Although not at fault of the room by any means, the experience wasn't as great as I recalled. Still fun for sure, but I do wish it was shown a little more love.

Puzzle Quality: 6/20 Looks/Theme: 8/15 GameMaster Rating: 4/10 Operation Fluidity: 4/5 Combined Rating: 22/50 Overall Difficulty: 3.5/10 Price: $29/Person Quick Notes: - Multiple rooms, medium in size - More than one of the puzzles were not intuitive and not clear on the objective. CATEGORIES EXPLAINED IN MORE DETAIL BELOW: Puzzle Quality - How intuitive, logical, and unique the puzzles were. How well do the puzzles fit the theme? Looks/Theme - How much effort, time, and money went into making an immersive and unique atmosphere. GameMaster Rating - How attentive and helpful was the game master? Were the hints given in a timely manner and were they quality hints that helped but did not give you the solution too directly? Operation Fluidity - Was the game reset properly? Was it clean inside the room? Were the code entry and solution methods working properly as intended? Overall Difficulty - This is fairly subjective but is mostly correlated to how many total puzzles and how time consuming they each are compared against the 60 minute time limit that almost all rooms have. Combined Rating - Simply a total tally out of 50 of the four main categories. (Puzzle Quality and Looks/Theme are weighted a little more because they are the most important parts of having a good experience). The higher the number, the better the room! Just remember that a 5/10 or 7.5/15 or a 25/50 combined rating is an AVERAGE rating (for some reason in most people’s heads, a 5/10 is a below average or bad rating). So if a room has a combined rating of above 25, then it is a quality room and a good experience that I would recommend! It has to be a really well done room to score above a 35.