Your time in an escape room may be great fun or a total nightmare that requires more than a review but therapy.
The following escape room reviews and experiences come from brave souls around the world who dared to enter and managed to get out, albeit scathed.
If your idea of a quality night out is being trapped in a room with five other people, escape rooms can be a blast. If you’re not familiar with the concept, an escape room is an entertainment experience where you pay to be holed up in a themed room where you solve various puzzles until you manage to “escape” or your time runs out.
If like me, you find the thought of being close to that many actual humans for an hour relying partly on their ability to think critically, escape rooms represent everything you fear in this life, notwithstanding clowns. Where some people see a fun night out with friends and family, I see a poignant metaphor for the horrors of forced social interaction, a feeling I’d like to think the creators of Escape Room share.
The escape room trend is still going strong, so of course, there’s a movie capitalizing on it. In this game-night-gone-amok tale, a handful of strangers are coerced into a real-life escape room scenario that’s as trippy as it is deadly. To kick off the release of Escape Room, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite scary escape room experiences and reviews.
1. The Perils of Getting Stuck With Randos
If you don’t have enough friends to fill up the escape room, your group can be combined with another. But beware. Redditor Chezdor is here to warn the Internet of what can happen when you’re mixed up with strangers in an escape room.
“A few months ago, in NYC. My friend L had lost her job so had no money to hang out. Out of the blue she texts me, ‘wanna go to an escape room this weekend?’ ‘Sure, sounds fun’, I reply. I don’t ask any questions cause I’m naive and trusting like that. I know better now.
Saturday comes around, we confirm the time and I make my way there. En route, I receive a message from L: I’m stuck on the subway but here’s a photo of my friend so you can find him when you arrive. I think there are other people joining us so you might have to start without me.
The photo of her ‘friend’ is a tinder screenshot.”
Chezdor’s friend was a no-show, and poor Chezdor ended up in a group with the Tinder date and a heavily pregnant woman and her husband, who tried to muscle his way through the escape room when his brain couldn’t get the job done, starting a fire in the process.
“TL;DR – Friend invited me to an escape room. Ended up blindfolded and handcuffed to her tinder date when she didn’t show up on time,” Chezdor summarizes, “and we got trapped in a small fire caused by a random gung-ho pregnant man.”
2. The Scariest Part of an Escape Room is the Math
Of all the scary things you might find in an escape room, none is more terrifying than the math. Reddit user Mello-Knight finally found a use for all that high school learning we all thought we’d never use again.
“...I tried my first escape room with my friends and we made a horrible team. No one was listening to each other and whenever I picked up a clue to look at it, someone took it out of my hands. So I did my own thing, solving something that included doing a math problem. Got a number that didn't match any locks.
While my friends moved their chaos to the second room, I chilled out on a bunk and stared out the fake submarine window at sharks swimming by. Then a hint flashed on the screen that said ‘Check your math.’ My friends all rushed into the room and were really confused by it, plus we hadn't even requested a hint.
Thinking of the escape room worker taking pity on the math-challenged girl and giving her a free hint still amuses me.”
3. Left Behind in The Escape Room
Sometimes you’re having so much fun you forget something important; you know, like a whole human being. That’s what happened to Reddit user PepperFinn, who was abandoned by colleagues and left chained to a wall.
“4 of us (me, good co-worker, co-worker, and owner) were doing an escape room,” PepperFinn recalls. “This one had 4 different rooms (technically 5) as part of our set to solve. At the start we get divided up. I’m chained to a wall in one room with a dog lead with one end padlocked to my wrist and the easy remove latch to the wall (so if a fire or something happened I could escape but I’m not supposed to solve getting out that way).”
PepperFinn’s colleagues entered the room and promptly solved a puzzle “involving liquids and weights.”
Pepperfinn continued, “The next room opens and its a laser maze. Owner is super excited and rushes off with co-worker. Forgetting they haven’t solved or even found the clues to the padlock on my wrist. Good co-worker is pulling my chain, trying combos while I’m shouting.
‘Guys? Guys? GUYS!!! A LITTLE HELP HERE!?’ and frantically pulling to get free. I got bruises.
The walkie crackles with ‘You have to rescue ALL team members before you do the maze.’ Owner reluctantly comes back, intermittently goes to stare at maze while not really helping me get unstuck.
We finally find the code that gets me free but I get to forever guilt him with that. And yes I’ve done more rooms with him since.”
4. Good Luck Escaping Now
Redditor Crinfarr tells a story that can only be attributed to poor escape room planning.
“*walk into room
*wizard themed
*’you must get into the closet!’
*closet has 3 locks
*30 minutes pass, we eventually get all 3 locks open
*in the closet: clothes. friend goes 'what? that can't be it!'
*we push him into closet
*hear thump
*closet locks when you close it
*he had the paper with the clues on it
*closet had door in back that led to other room
*we can't get back into room because he has the key
*we lost
*he got to last room
*fml”
5. The Real Reason AI Is Going to Take Over
If you think a nameless, faceless entity running a deadly escape room is scary, just wait until you see what our robot overlords do to us after the technological singularity. In the meantime, we’ll be holding hands skipping toward our doom because artificial intelligence (AI) is just so darned convenient, as Redditor ClearBrightLight learned.
“A bunch of friends and I did an escape room at New York Comic Con last year, and it was spectacular, despite being basically a giant advertisement for Amazon. Basically there was an Alexa in each room, and you had to have her do things like turn on/off lights, do complicated math, relay messages to other ‘operatives,’ etc.
There was one room that involved finding symbols to plug into a long-division equation, and it ended up being something like (2467+1)/7. The spokeswoman in our group started to ask Alexa for the answer, but (and I know this is what she was thinking, because I was running on the same track) deciding that Alexa might get confused, broke the problem down into steps. The first being ‘Alexa, what's 2467 plus one?’
As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized just how dumb that was, and her face just went blank with shock, in a perfect ‘did I actually just say that?!’ expression. We solved the puzzle and got through with about two minutes to spare, but I so wish I had a picture of my friend's face at the exact moment she realized she'd used a talking calculator to add one.”
6. You’re Here to Entertain the Staff
Sometimes, working in an escape room has unexpected rewards, especially if the room is chock full ‘o jump scares and other freaky tricks. Reddit user QuoyanHayel shared this experience from the MBK Center in Thailand.
“Did a room in Bangkok which was creepy as f*ck. At one point I had to answer a ringing telephone but as soon as I lifted the receiver, a portrait across the room dropped off the wall with a huge bang. I screamed, and my boyfriend said he could hear the people on the front desk laughing through the wall.”
Redditor control-room has a similar story.
“My friends and I did one escape room that had a bunch of tin cans scattered across the rooms. Like 25 of them. Not sure who got it in their heads that we needed them, but for some reason we started carrying them from room to room. Each of us with hand-fulls of tin cans. They served no purpose. There was never anything about needing tin cans. The guy running the thing was killing himself laughing at us once we got out. Of course, he then had to go out them all back.”
7. Sometimes You Get What You Pay For
Just because you can learn how to make an escape room online doesn’t mean you should, as Reddit user blademak learned.
“One room we did was pretty ghetto and run by a lady who I assume had maybe read an article about how to make an escape room and hastily put things together without having a logic test performed. When we didn't make it out, I held up 3-4 objects and asked, ‘but then what are these for?’ (One of these items, for example, was a foam cube painted to look like a Rubik Cube, and on one side someone had written a large number.)
The lady laughed and said that those items were just there to throw people off. I almost demanded my money back, but I DID buy it on Groupon so.... I don't think this escape room is around anymore anyway.”
8. Behind Every Rule Is a Backstory
The common thread when reading through most escape room reviews is how weird the rules can get, and as any escape room employee will tell you, there’s a story behind each and every one of them.
“I did escape the room once and there were the most hilarious signs and warnings. Like ‘do not try to escape the room through the skylight' and 'do not escape the room by breaking through the wall’ or ‘the in case of emergency fire extinguisher is for real emergencies. It is NOT a clue.’
And then all the extra warnings on top of warnings because people will think the warnings are clues. Eg ‘the fire extinguisher is not a clue. It is not hiding a clue. There is nothing involving the fire extinguisher that is a part of the game. Please do not touch the fire extinguisher unless there is a real actual fire.’
No joke. Funnier when you realize each one of those warnings is there because someone tried it.”
Klaus_Haas shares his story, too.
“I tried [an escape room] in Budapest. A specifically stated rule was that we wouldn't have to physically move anything to solve the various puzzles. Anyways, there was one sort of library room that upon entering, my pathetic party of Welsh boys and Irish girls on a pissing tour immediately began ripping all the books off the shelves in a mad savage attempt to find some sort of code.
About 15 seconds into this room rape, the middle aged Hungarian dude working as guide disappointingly reminded us over the intercom that our actions were ultimately unnecessary to solving the cursed room.
Needless to say, we all felt a bit foolish.”
Redditor gerrydm experienced a similar escape room horror.
“The room was brand new, it had just opened to the public and we were one of the first non-test groups to play it.
One of the items we had unlocked was a box out of which came two wires, each of them terminated with a banana plug. A while later, in a second part of the room, another member of the group noticed a power outlet which seemed to have some marks. They looked a bit like + and - signs."
The team got no response when they asked the operator, "So, we're going to stick those plugs in the power outlet, please say something now if that isn't what you're supposed to do." Gerrydm went for it: “I put the plugs in the outlet. There was a spark. The room went dark. I basically killed the game right there.”
NULL_pntr’s story echoes this startling theme.
“We did an escape room one time where there were these jars with severed limbs in them. When we got out we commented to the guy running it that we found it interesting that the jars were cement glued shut, cement glued to the shelf, and the shelf screwed to the wall. Seemed like overkill to us.
Well apparently the reason they do this was because another group had managed to pry the jars away from the shelf and open the jars. This is about when they realized, watching the cameras, that something was going on. So they rush in to see what's up and he hears, ‘Guys! We have to drink the water!!’
The nasty part was the water was out of the local river a few blocks away, just to get that dirty murky look.”
Read more about this horrifying trend at Cracked.
9. They Brought Their Own Horror Story
Sometimes the scariest part of a horror-themed escape room is what you bring with you, as one Reddit user’s story explained.
“On a work's night out a couple of weeks ago, one of my co-worker’s got blackout drunk before we were supposed to meet up at the venue. When we all got there, it was pretty obvious how drunk this guy was as he was stumbling across chairs and slurring his words.
Anyways, we all got split into groups to go into our separate rooms. We entered the room and the lights were turned off, then this guy starts declaring how much he needs to piss. This was one of the horror rooms, loosely based on the Saw movies, so there was an empty toilet with a key to open one of the padlocks for a puzzle inside. He literally pulls his pants down to his ankles and starts urinating in this standalone toilet. Everyone is looking in horror at what the fuck is happening in front of them. Piss is flowing from the bottom of the toilet onto the floor now. Everyone is backed up into a corner to avoid the ominous trickle of doom.
Children are screaming.
Somehow, the employees never noticed until we had made it out of the room and he was left behind sleeping on one of the mattresses cuddling with a bloodied dead body.”
There’s no shortage of positive or negative escape room reviews, which is likely going to be the case for Escape Room, too. It’s a good thing then that movie theaters don’t lock the doors once the movie starts — you can escape at any time!
