The Anomaly

A different type of escape room with three sections of 20 minutes. I didn’t like it better or worse than the normal 60 minute experience, just different with added pressure but the ability to ensure you see everything and all rooms. Storyline was fun and nostalgic and game master Tylan made the entire experience wonderful.

Fantastic room! Definitely not for beginners.

The execution of this one doesn't land well in my opinion. Conceptually it is very different from what you'd normally expect in an escape room. There's three separate/sectioned off spaces with puzzles you need to solve, and you're given twenty minutes in each section to solve everything. We ended up getting more stressed than felt like we were having any fun. Some of the puzzles were so unclear in what to do that we became too frustrated to concintrate on solving anything.

Really don’t like the structure here, as it feels so bad to be on the “last minute time crunch” for the whole game. Would work better if it was just a standard 60 minutes for the whole thing, rather than 20 minutes for each section. None of the rooms play or interact with each other, which isn’t nearly as fun as PuzzleWorks’s other stuff.

Another stellar room from Puzzleworks! This story and structure is really unique, and a great challenge for skilled puzzlers and escape artists

All of the rooms at Puzzleworks are well done, but I recommend saving this one for last and a group of 3-4 highly skilled puzzlers Most rooms you’re just working towards escaping in the allotted time. But with this room you’re basically doing three disjoint 20 minute rooms. Regardless of your performance in each room, you still “escape”. This room is different in that you’re just working towards a score which gets put on a leaderboard against other arbitrary scores My wife and I are avid, casual puzzlers. We aren’t interested in the competitive side of escape rooms. We just want to complete all of the puzzles in a room and escape before time runs out. There were several puzzles we did not solve in this room because we ran out of time in the various segments and were forced to move on to the next part. If at any point you get stuck on any of the puzzles I highly recommend asking for a clue immediately or else your experience might be similar to ours where you “won” but didn’t get to solve all of the puzzles and don’t even get to know what you did wrong Also, we thought we had solved a couple of the puzzles in the first segment correctly but based on our final result we messed them up. Not having immediate feedback on whether or not your solution is correct with the opportunity to try it again if you’re wrong is very frustrating Anyhow, do this room with a group of either three or four puzzlers who know what they’re doing and are up for a competitive room and ask for hints the moment you get stuck on anything and you’ll have a nice time. Enjoy your arbitrary point total at the end To be clear: don’t send more than four people into this room. There wasn’t enough parallelizable work to keep that many people busy One other thing to note: there’s no common ground / plot between the three disjoint rooms which seems like a miss

This room really has a unique concept: earning a score rather than a time. Instead of a straight 60 minutes, the game is broken into 3 chunks of 20 minutes each. If some puzzles are not completed by the end of those twenty minutes it results in a lower score rather than an “incomplete”. Interesting in concept and has some serious benefits, but to me it led to the game feeling somewhat disjointed, like doing 3 unrelated mini games. Still a really fun time though! I would recommend giving it a shot. All the puzzles (with the exception of one) were really quite fun. Current high score holders!