Mogollon Monster: Scouting for Arizona's BigfootThe Nemesis ClubEscape roomIRLThe Nemesis club has some fun gimmicks getting you in the door, and it lives up to its reputation of high quality, top-notch rooms. The Mogollon Monster makes a great use of its space, tech and mechanics to immerse you and make the production feel so much larger. It is very well designed, with high quality props and scenery. Our GM was top notch and was able to provide hints for our small 2 person team without spoiling the solves for us and kept us immersed in the room. If you're trying to decide between Evil Robots and Mogollon Monster, our rec is Mogollon Monster - although both are great,
Sal's CyberneticsThe Immersive MachineEscape roomIRLHands down one of the best escape rooms we've been to and easily the best in Phoenix/AZ. You owe it yourself to experience this if you're a fan of escape rooms, cyberpunk or immersive experiences in general. The experience has been crafted with passion and attention to detail, from the "waiting room" to the actual room itself. The puzzles are smart and well thought out in terms of placement, challenge and teamwork elements. The guide in the experience itself was a riot, making the experience ever more fun. Every effort has been spent to place you in this wonderful bit of worldbuilding and it just works so, so well. This is clearly a labor of love, and it shows. We had the good fortune to have a chat afterwards with one of the owners/creators who mentioned they have plans to expand. We look forward to the expansion to come, as we're likely to make the trek out to experience it when it is finished!
EVIL RobotsThe Nemesis ClubEscape roomIRLThe Nemesis club has some fun gimmicks getting you in the door, and it lives up to its reputation of high quality, top-notch rooms. Evil Robots makes a great use of its space, tech and mechanics to immerse you. This is themed around atomic age retro futurism and is full of action-thriller, comedy and scifi elements. I appreciated the entry - the opening area prevents access to the main space and forces creative physical solutions from those constraints.
WarlockedQuest Room - Redondo BeachEscape roomIRLWarlocked is a larger multi-part room that combines high production values, tech and mechanics with a classic family friendly plot and mechanics. David did an excellent job running us through Warlocked, and the whole thing gave me vibes of classic fantasy adventure games.
Arizona Steampunk RailwayNorth Valley Escape RoomEscape roomIRLThe gimmick here is large screens and motion elements for immersion. This was a solid room, but did require some backtracking and had a few obscure/obtuse solves. This has some solid tech and puzzles that make good use of its theme and (admittedly thin) plot. Definitely worth expriencing.
BeWitchedLara’s Labyrinth - San Diego [prev. Quest Room]Escape roomIRLThis feels like the prototype to Warlocked (a better room/experience IMHO), the thematic elements props and design are similar and the site was previously a Quest Room. The production values are similarly high, but this is significantly smaller/shorter. While this was fun we did have a few complaints: This is easy, but we ended up overthinking a few of the easy albeit obtuse puzzles impeding our progress. Others rely heavily on listening to long recordings, sometimes hard to hear or process over the ambience. Some puzzles rely on party interaction and so are highly dependent on your performance and GM as well. The "live actors" are hand puppets and part of the experience is dependent on their ability to perform/provide hints. The "levels" provided seemed to be slightly incongruent with their description, our experience (Malediction) didn't seem jive with what was described. Most of all, it was *extremely* dark and that made some puzzles challenging simply because visibility was limited. Some physical elements could definitely be hampered by size, either larger adults or teenagers. The dark and size constraints also amplified what could be a claustrophobia trigger for the exit - which we weren't warned about.
