You awake in a dimly lit room with no windows and only one door; your head pounding and realize you’re cuffed to a chain. You realize you’re not alone – your friends are cuffed along with you. The door is locked and there’s no way out. You must now work together to free yourselves to outsmart your captor and make it out alive!

The Great Escape of La Crosse

Captive

Escape room

I went with my husband and best friend as a group of three to the "Captive" room. Me and my husband have gone to at least 6 rooms together, and we have all been to many rooms by different companies before.

CONFUSING DESIGN:
We have actually made very good time on other rooms, and typically don't ask for many hints. We were given MANY hints in this room, and most of them unprompted in the first 20 minutes. I have never been given an unrequested hint before the 30 minute mark. A start that poor from people so experienced, can only be caused by a poor room design. We escaped with only 13 seconds left. Overall, the order of puzzles and directionality of the room was a mess. Many puzzles had to be done sequentially, but that order was not obvious, leading to us walking around like idiots trying to solve things we weren't meant to yet. It also made parallel work hard, so even having 3 people was almost too many, as we all had to work on the same puzzle.

TOO MANY NUMBER LOCKS:
Locks are very often scatted across escape rooms as with this one, but unlike other rooms, this had far too many locks that all involved 5(2-3 locks) or 4(4-5 locks) digits, leading to us entering codes into the wrong lock or multiple locks many times. One or two locks with an overlapping number of digits I get, but there were far too many locks with the same number of digits.

BACKGROUND:
At the start of most rooms, there is a video to give background and info on what brought you to the room. This room did not have that. Instead, there was a 3 minute long instructional video for what not to do. That could all have been said by the staff member, instead of wasting three minutes without even giving us background information. After completing the room, me and my group discussed, and we still have no idea what the killers motive was, the reason we were targeted, how we would be killed, etc. We quite literally learned nothing about the killer. There was no plot.

POORLY DESIGNED PUZZLES:
I will say, the room had quite a few puzzles that were interesting and I have never seen before. I did like that. But many of the "codes" were far too long and confusing. There was a directional puzzle with 15 directions, and some of the directions needed to be found with words that are not commonly associated with a direction in escape rooms. There was also a 20ish long number sequence, where one of the numbers was near impossible to find. I won't say how exactly, but it was unintentionally "hidden" by being miniscule, poorly placed, and in a dark area. For both of these puzzles, we had to go through the codes several times. We found the same thing most of the time, but still missed things, and had to be outright told the codes. There was also a puzzle that had to be read from two directions. It was confusing as it was a math problem meant to be read one way on one side, and the opposite on the other. It just didn't make sense without the hint the game master had to provide us.

AGAINST STANDARD ESCAPE ROOM RULES:
Many of the puzzle pieces had to be used multiple times for different puzzles. Many escape room tutorials will tell you to pile everything used onto one area, as they normally aren't used a second time. There was also a problem of poor orientation on some puzzles where orientation is key. I had to lie down in a specific direction to read ciphers, but 1/5 was completely turned so it was angled in a way that didn't make sense (pig pen cipher).

Overall, it was definitely interesting, just poorly designed. We did have a good time, but most of it was filled with confusion, never excitement at a "win".

As a Christian, parts of it also just seemed too dark. I do understand that it was a murder room, but there was a dead child whose body you had to reach into. That's a personal issue though, not really a problem with the room if you are okay with that sort of thing. We truly had no idea going into it how violent and creepy it would be.


As an update, I posted this 4 months ago, and the team responded almost immediately with apologies, explained they were working on redoing the rooms, and asked to make it right. The manager/owner or whoever was great!

Captive

The Great Escape of La Crosse

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TheMidwestPuzzlersWife