Thursday, June 9, 2016

Escape the Room Boston: The Dig

This is my spoiler-free review of my experience at Escape the Room Boston.

First, finding this place was a nightmare, as was finding parking. Downtown locations are always a bit of a pain, but this was worse than most. I've heard many bad things about Boston traffic flow, and now I think they're all true! I'd highly recommend parking elsewhere and taking an Uber to the location. The building wasn't well marked when I was there in Fall '15, either. Be sure you read their directions on how to get in.

I was originally expecting to do this room with just myself an engineer coworker. Then eight local music students showed up! It certainly made for an interesting mix, but everything worked really well. We made it out with about ten minutes left on the clock. The staff at this location were perhaps less enthusiastic than some I've seen, but I had no complaints, by any means.

While I will not give any hints to solving puzzles, I will be describing some minor details about the room. Nothing I say will help you solve anything, but it will tell you some vague details that aren't obvious when you first walk in. If you wish to remain utterly surprised by everything, stop here.

This game has the plot of an archaeological dig, but you start in a church setting. It's pretty obvious from the start that there's more to the room than you see, but the depths may surprise you. The lights are dim, and the room has several battery-operated candles in it. This is an excellent touch, really adds to the feel of the place; you have to actually pick up the candles and hold them to things to be able to see them!

As I write this I have done nine rooms with six companies across the country. Almost everything in this room is unique in my experience; nothing about it feels overdone or repetitive. The production quality is as good as any room I've seen, and the attention to detail is excellent. Additionally, this is one of the few rooms I've seen where running it with the maximum number of people isn't likely to be a nightmare. I often feel like running with a smaller group works better, just because of space constraints, but I didn't this time.

Really, there's almost nothing I can say that isn't good. At one point we found an unlocked box, only for the game master to come into the room and tell us to ignore it until we found the key. Apparently they failed to reset the room properly! That's not fantastic, but things happen. I'm surprised I don't see incomplete resets more often, honestly, given the details involved. Other than that I have no suggestions for improvement or feedback. This is just an excellent room, and I recommend it to anyone.


Rating: 10/10

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