The Anomaly

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!