Deliverance

We had a good time with the puzzles!!

A complete and utter failure at immersion, gameplay, and scares. After hearing for years how Intense Escape has “must play” rooms like this one, it’s nothing short of a terrible disappointment. Did everyone else play the same room? I’m still in disbelief while writing this. Buckle up, this is a doozy of a review. Don’t want to read the entire review? Here’s the short version: The story is non-sensical and nothing made any logical sense for why you’re doing anything (save for the main attraction at the end). The puzzles are frustrating, illogical, poorly conceived and not the least bit fun (except for the end, again). The art direction and set design is appallingly cheap and offensively bad, and the interactive “intense” parts are just plain stupid and add nothing to the experience (except for the end, once again). Want to know more? Read on 💀 Let me quickly get out of the way the good. The ending. Its most entertaining part, and was fun, pretty creative, had clever use of effects and was very enjoyable. Unfortunately, you have to endure the rest of the bad experience to get to it. If the rest of the experience had featured this level of creativity and ingenuity, it would be a must play. However, that’s about all the good I can say about this one. You know you’re in for a bad time the moment you walk into an escape room to see unfinished drop ceiling tiles, plain white walls with poor set design, beat up/poorly maintained props, horrible (and cheap) lighting that doesn’t enhance the mood, along with countless objects with glue stains, endless “DO NOT TOUCH” labels and a stained low pile office carpet that hasn’t been replaced since the previous tenants moved out. It would even be fair call this an insult for the cost. These days I have a very low tolerance level for a business charging high prices for gimmicky, lack luster experiences and subpar cheap set decor. It isn’t 2014 anymore, I don’t care what your budget is, escape room companies have zero excuse to allow paying customers to walk into a room as poorly furnished and decorated as one like this, while paying roughly $40-$45 PER PERSON for the privilege. It’s egregious. A group of three will pay close to $150 to be left in a crummy small office room filled with discounted finds from a thrift store, while being bathed in a dim red Halloween light that makes it near impossible to see any detail or tell colors apart for puzzles. I understand that this room is technically “new” at this spot, having recently migrated from their other location and previously receiving rave reviews. I can only surmise the reviews were for one of the following three reasons: 1. It was a novel gimmick at a time nobody had seen anything like this because expectations for escape rooms were still very low OR 2. The novel gimmick completely clouded any participants objective judgement about the completely lacking and illogical escape room experience as a whole OR 3. The previous version may genuinely have been better executed and great. And if it was option 3, then why was this allowed to exist in its current form having such a good reputation at its old location? I cannot for the life of me understand that if THIS was the experience everyone was raving about, how could it possibly have gotten this screwed up during its transition to another location? If that’s the case, that kind of mishandling really needs a deep dive to correct everything. But I still somehow highly doubt that scenario is what happened here. The feeling we got is that Intense Escape’s whole shtick is that it’s “intense” because there’s actors that enter the room to “mess” with you, and the thinking here is that’s somehow supposed to make it okay that the rest of the actual “escape room” experience is extremely amateurish, lacking and dull. This isn’t a spoiler. They warn you multiple times before you enter about exactly what’s going to happen. The booking website even says it and you know going in or before entering the building. However, what happens isn’t even remotely intense, it’s really off-putting and thematically weird (again, save for the ending). It’s actually more frustrating and stupid as it needlessly eats into your time, forcing you to wait until they leave. We’ve played a lot of escape rooms at this point. This isn’t our first rodeo. There is a very fine line between clever and frustrating when it comes to puzzles and flow. They both were obtuse and ridiculous, with glacial flow and nonsensical logic, whose pacing only gets underscored by needless interruptions from an actor, that add nothing to the experience (not even genuine scares), further wasting time toward your end goal. This is not immersive. This is genuinely bad game design, and is entirely unfair for experienced players trying to be actually immersed (with what little we have to work with). I say this often in bad reviews, and I’ll keep saying it. I hate writing reviews like this. I hate savaging an experience created by people who I assume do work hard to create these games. But hey, it takes a lot to work to write something like this review too. It is not fair for paying customers to endure something like this. It is not enough to just make a game and think that it is acceptable for it to be anything less than a quality experience, when you’re charging premium prices (much higher than far better experiences out there) for what amounts to a budget level game. I write reviews like this in the hopes an owner will read it and improve upon the experience so others get to have fun in the future. As of right now, I cannot recommend this escape room at all unless you want to see the ending, which alone is not worth the entry fee.