@ChaosD1's reviews on Morty

When we rated this room as a "like" know that it's a very low "like". I don't know what's going on with Axxiom's design philosophy in their latest rooms, but the puzzles have steadily become more and more esoteric. It's not often I do an escape room where I see a puzzle and recieve an item, but I have no idea how they correlate until I finally get a hint. (If I get one, but more on that in a bit.) I do appreciate that Axxiom is thinking out of the box. The box and locks design of their early rooms (High School Mystery, Pharoah's Tomb, Sherlock, Shawshank, etc) are all but completely erased, but in their place is a lot of magnetic item puzzles that end up being "rub the thing on the thing and see if it works" which is starting to dip into "Sierra Adventure game" territory. The second I have to place a wedge of cheese in a weird machine to charge a magic wand, I'm writing this place off forever. The room started off ok. Atmosphere was fun, and fitting. Interactive decorations were fairly obvious. The choice to camoflage the normally atmosphere-shattering hint and timer monitor as a stained glass window is a stroke of absolute genius I've never seen in an any escape room. The issue, was after figuring out a very simple first puzzle, we were granted a few items with absolutely no direction on what they were used for. We realized two were magnetic, and one was just covered in markings with little else to go on. It wasn't until recieving two hints, one that let us know a decoration was interactive without any special items, and the other mentioning how a specific item was used with one of the decorations around the room. I solved the first hint very quickly, but we both had a hard time trying to figure out how the other item worked with its decoration. We had a general idea, but we weren't getting a useful result. The first hint we got was something we already figured out. The second hint we got was ALSO something we already figured out. We sat there for roughly 25 minutes barely recieving any more hints until the puzzle was just opened for us. We also never recieved a hint about any other puzzle while my wife worked on the only puzzle we has a hint for, so I got to stand around being useless while poking at random items with a magnet. The rest of the puzzles we reached weren't as frustrating, but still as esoteric as the rest. The closest was seeing some symbols on an item, and using it on another decoration, but many of those symbols didn't look very similar to the ones of the decoration. When finally collecting all the items needed to open one of the boxes, it did lead to one of the most fun and active puzzles I've done since Fate of the North Pole at Axxiom Newark. Unfortunately it was followed but a lot more puzzles, and one very frustrating physical based one. We did not get out. We noticed just how much puzzles we had left when looking up at the timer and seeing there were only two minutes left. During the "are there any questions" portion of the ending experience I asked for clarification for a few of the puzzles. My main focus was the puzzle we spent over 20 minutes working on, where the game master admitted it was the puzzle that gave people the most trouble. For my opinion as a former game master, that means there's something very wrong with that puzzle. The game master also explained that a specific item was supposed to include the information for one of the other confusing puzzles, but they were scrambled. The game master claimed that they arrange the items to spell the solution since most wouldn't solve it. They were not in order when we came into the room, but they insisted they were, essentially blaming us for mixing them up when we started the game. We did not do that, and they gave me a quiet look like I was lying about this when I insisted we didn't. Do not gaslight me, bro. It's getting harder to recommend Axxiom rooms. While they are definitely improving in atmosphere, they are very quickly losing the plot in their puzzle design, leaning way too much on tech interactivity. I haven't stood around shrugging as much as I have in their latest rooms, when we both usually solve rooms with plenty of time to spare in dozens of other escape room establishments. Whatever happened to placing little lore notes with new puzzle items to at least nudge us in the right direction? Basically proceed with caution, and hope you have a game master that understands how cryptic this room is. No pun intended.

I like this room, but it has a lot of problems. First off, this room is not "hard". This room is "bloated." I was excited to see Countdown finally reach Axxiom Newark, after spending over half a decade advertising the room as one of the posters on the lobby wall. (When's your turn, "Enigma's Sanctum". The entire lobby is painted in your color scheme, FFS.) The first glance of Countdown is intimidating but impressive. Monitors blanket the walls, an impressively complex desk console takes up quite a lot of floorspace and a very scary looking capsule towers ominously on the rear wall. While it can look overwhelming, there's a lot that's pretty straightforward (for now). We were able to solve most of the puzzles, though having a couple escape room newbies made things a little harder for us when we knew the answer to puzzles they assumed were more complex. It's no secret that almost every Axxiom room nowadays has a "second room" and seeing it wasn't a surprise. It's as plain as day, fully presenting as a door, instead of a false wall, a secret bookcase or a weird decoration that swings or falls away as you solve a specific puzzle. This room has puzzles that are a little less straightforward, but still understandable. It easily takes a bit more brainpower and logical leaps to understand what to do, but they are all done in interesting ways that feel rewarding when completed. The issue comes after this... The second room is themed as the "bunker" you take shelter in as the result of your actions in the first room. The puzzles within (mostly) make sense with the theming of where you are and what you're doing. (The rest of this is technically a spoiler for how the room carries out, but does not directly reveal the solution to any puzzles. It does, however, describe the oddity of the pathing, and reveals the important items to focus on within it. Feel free to stop reading here if any of this interests you. Just know that this room doesn't finish as soon as it feels like it would.) ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... We felt accomplished, as we hit the last puzzle and watched an animation of the bunker traveling upward, which felt like a logical conclusion to the room. Then we noticed the timer wasn't shutting off. The animation played on the monitors for what felt like over a minute, until the doors opened and revealed... another room. The tonal shift is absolute whiplash, and hit us in multiple ways. Annoyance, disappointment and confusion mostly. The vibe was nice, as calming music played and we were confronted with the look of a quaint Main Street village scene. A row of two shops lined the wall and the opposite wall contained a building with a single locked door. We had a very short amount of time left before completing the bunker, and thought that this surprise room had maybe one or two puzzles left. Our hopes were dashed as we realized this room was far more complicated than that. We completed about one or two more puzzles before time ran out. We asked how far we had to go when the timer expired and the game master explained nearly 6 more puzzles worth of instructions, with incredibly esoteric and nonsensical solutions that I don't believe we would have solved with 20 minutes left, let alone 6. This room is also narrative nonsense. A missile command center? Certainly. A radiation bunker in need of repair? Makes perfect sense. A quaint Mainstreet with a candy shop that requires you to line up horoscope symbols from the adjacent shop with a work schedule calendar, in order to know which candy jars correlate with the numbers in the employee logbook so you know what number to call in the phone book outside? I'm sorry WHAT? What did this room have to do with anything? Why am I trying to ESCAPE THE OUTSIDE by going INTO a building. We stopped the missile, we repaired the bunker. We were finished. There was no logic to why we were in the third room, or any logical starting point, as nothing in that room seemed like a clear threat that needed to be solved. Our entire group of 4 was convinced we escaped, because technically, we did escape the bunker, and sorting out the employee scheduling issues of a sweets shop didn't feel like it carried the same gravitas as the threat of nuclear annihilation. I don't know why this room is here, I don't know why there's so many puzzles in it, and I definitely don't know why the time limit is only an hour for this one. Mason's Temple in Axxiom Wilmington set that's room's timer to 90 minutes because almost no one was able to solve all of that rooms puzzles within an hour. Countdown needs to follow suit. I still recommend the room, despite the absolute nonsensicality of the final room. It's (almost) thematically perfect, and many of the puzzles in the first and second rooms are pretty clever. Just know that having less than ten minutes to solve the final room will likely be impossible, and having over a minute of that time wasted by an animation won't make that discovery feel any better. Either bump up the time, shorten the animation, or tighten up the puzzles, and you'll have something I'd recommend on the level of Sorcerer's Quest at this same location.

This room is the room you take people to if they have a negative assumption about escape rooms. Be it the belief about being locked in a small space, or only having their knowledge of escape rooms come from a sitcom. Even just walking into the room is a major part of the experience, as you're greeted with a surprisingly tall room decorated far more thematically than an average "box and locks". It's practically themepark levels of detail, cemented even more by an actual animatronic that gets revealed later in the puzzle path. It has been a while since attempting this room, so I don't know how much is pertinent to the current experience, but it is just that memorible. Some puzzles are more intimidating than others and come across more complex than they actually are at first glance. Others actually are somewhat confusing until you realize that something that does not remotely look like a push button is actually a push button. A certain puzzle involving plants and potions is a bit less frustrating once you have this info. Overall this room is very interactive with very little to complain about. This room actually converted an escape room wary friend into another enthusiast. If you're only able to visit one room at Axxiom Newark, make it this one.

This is written more as an "in memoriam" than a useful review as not only is the room gone, but the company that hosted and created it. This was likely one of my favorite rooms I'd done in Delaware. While I will disclose I was an employee of Great Escape from 2019-2020 (you can probably guess why I'm not anymore) this was one of three rooms I had done and paid for before becoming an employee. This was one of the last rooms they had created before going out of business, and easily my favorite of their lot. The room design was simple and sparsely decorated, but believable enough as an elementary school-tier science room. Each puzzle seemed fairly straightforward and deceptively simple, with the exception of one or two. The test tube vials required literal "out of the box" thinking as they correlated to a giant box of crayons, and the colors that were missing. A lightbox "sudoku puzzle" was often a wall for most of the players, which didn't seem very responsive and was one of the first visible puzzles you could solve. (I found out when working there that the puzzle didn't work as intended and we had to manually trigger the "solved" condition.) There was a massive jumpscare moment when a metal portrait would drop when finishing a certain puzzle. Really fun and clever puzzles involved using a camera scope to locate a number hidden inside a drawer, using 4 colored dice to solve a lock that also featured those colors, and also setting up a set of dominoes where one half was in braille. The concept of the "shrink room" was fun in that you got to play with a ton of giant objects, though the amount of time spent assembling a giant lego wall was a bit of an intentional time sink that not have been very fun for smaller groups. It was highest recommended by me, and when working there was rhe room I worked hardest at upkeeping and improving, like recording and creating an intro, and improving the reliability of problem-prone puzzles, even after the owners were letting it fall by the wayside.

(I was an employee of this escape room location, but challenged this room before working there. This is an archival review. The room and location no longer exist.) Walkers was an awful room. I can't be more straightforward than that. The entire thing felt like a rushjob to capitalize on the already fading popularity of a TV show and dumped out for the Halloween season. Most everyone I knew, challengers and employees alike hated everything about this room and one even wanted to contact the fire marshall due to the way it was designed. I'll go through the basic experience, start to finish without giving away the answers, not that that matters anymore. You start the room in (nearly) total darkness, despite whoever decided the monitor background needed to be bright white. (I recall it was done to provide more light, which defeats the purpose of the lantern and the "starting in total darkness.") One participant was given a lantern and chained to the wall with an actual full locking, non trick handcuff. The rest were locked in a cage of chainlink fencing with a padlock holding the door shut. (it wasn't until much later that both locks were attached to quick release carabiners in the event the players needed to leave for an emergency.) The starting experience forced you into a single puzzle, that was as cerebral as solving a Where's Waldo book in the back of a car at night. This also forced the progression of the room on ONE person, while the rest stood around in the zoo enclosure, twiddling their thumbs until the handcuffed player located the code scratched on the doorframe behind them. Once the cage was unlocked and the rest of the people you brought are finally allowed to play the game as well, you can turn on the lights, or be a tryhard and leave them off, to see the walls scrawled in esoteric nonsense and the names of characters for the show, and a clue for a puzzle that isn't used until the very last part of the game. The mid level puzzles werent the worst. Some were easy to figure out how they related to other puzzles, and nearly all fell into "find the code for the box" as the room consisted of nearly 10 locks in total, with only one "pseudo-magnetic puzzle" (The puzzle didn't work and was activated by the game master after the correct arrangement was seen on camera. Well over half the puzzles were "find code for a locked box just hiding somewhere in the room." with the rest being simple puzzles that resulted... in a code for a locked box. I often use the term "box and locks" for an escape room that hinges mostly on this kind of puzzle design, and lacks more technologically advanced features. This isn't inherently a bad thing, as one could nearly say the same for Dr. Tyknee's Lab, but it's all in the approach. But when I say Walkers in a "box and locks" room, I very much mean that as a disparaging remark. Every puzzle hinged on this design so heavily, that opening one of these locked boxes would present you with EVEN MORE locked boxes. Sometimes 2 or 3! It felt less like an escape room and more like opening an incredibly secure matroyshka doll. The feeling of solving a puzzle should feel rewarding, but if your "reward" for opeing a locked box is getting another locked box, it's disheartening and tiring. One of the least useful hints was a hexagon with a number inside it, It was easy to match that to one of the bolts you found in a locked box, but there was little else given about it. The solution was to somehow know it was a fake bolt. with a message hidden inside of it when you twisted off the top from the body of the bolt. IOnce I was hired there, I decided to add three curved arrows around the hexagon clue to make it a little more logical to come to the "unscrew the bolt" conclusion. The final "escape door" was a psyche-out, where opening the door revealed a brick wall, with a keypad, FINALLY requiring the use of that clue you were given at the beginning of the game. Ignoring that annoyance, it was a pretty cool "twist" unless you were looking at single digit minutes on your clock and assumed you were done. Using that code opened a VERY SMALL door that you had to physically crawl out of to officially escape. I attached that hint to the brick wall itself to allievate the pain of getting a seemingly useless clue you'll likely forget about by the time it's required. The escape rate wasn't great if the game master wasn't sympathetic to the group, or the group itself was insistant on not getting hints. It was an embarrasing blight on the otherwise, fairly charming and unique puzzles that Great Escape was normally known for. But don't worry, it can't hurt us any more.

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Axxiom Escape Rooms - Wilmington

The Countdown: Covert Ops

Axxiom Escape Rooms - Newark

Sorcerers' Quest

Axxiom Escape Rooms - Newark

Dr. Tyknee's Laboratory

Great Escape Delaware

Walkers

Great Escape Delaware

Vampire's Haven