embarrassingdad

Reviews

Reviews

Pudding Lane

Pudding Lane

Cronologic

  • Escape room
  • IRL
Great set decoration with terrific use of historical detail. Excellent puzzle flow as well. I have to give a special nod to our GM Jack, who was clearly watching closely-- he gave exactly the right nudges at exactly the right times. And he was knowledgable and passionate about the game as well. Also, I want to praise the game for giving us the best set of flashlights I've encountered in an escape room. They were small and lightweight but very bright. I wish other rooms with atmospheric lighting would follow their lead! (I realise that’s a small, almost trivial detail, but it’s indicative of the overall attention to detail that made this room so great.) All in all, one of my favorite games in the UK.
Lab Rat

Lab Rat

Hatch Escapes

  • Escape room
  • IRL
One of those rooms where everything — set design, story, puzzles— clicks together to form an immensely satisfying whole. Add in a great sense of humor and excellent, attentive GM-ing and I can see why this has managed to stay in the TERPECA rankings for seven straight years. (To set expectations: the game is originally from 2018, and its current ranking in the TERPECA 200s feels about right. It is a delightful game that absolutely deserves to be celebrated, but don’t expect the epic scale of the newer or higher ranked TERPECA finalists.)
Demise of the Gricers

Demise of the Gricers

Entered

  • Escape room
  • IRL
VERY IMPORTANT: This game is physically dangerous. I would say it is roughly as dangerous as skateboarding or downhill skiing. That's not an intolerable level of physical hazard for a leisure activity-- but it is substantially more dangerous than a well-run escape room. Gricers offers many of the same pleasures of a good escape room-- it's an exciting story-driven challenge in a fully immersive environment. I'm not surprised it's been embraced by the escape room community, but I worry that leads to people diving into it with inaccurate expectations around risk. If you are enough of an escape room enthusiast to be using Morty, you have probably skimmed through or ignored numerous overwrought safety warnings for escape rooms. Do NOT ignore the safety warning that comes with Gricers! If you do choose to play, I encourage you to read the Room Escape Artist's review first. It has some useful information that will help you play more safely (although, again, still with a skiing-level of risk.)
Disparue [Missing]

Disparue [Missing]

Enigma-Tic

  • Escape room
  • IRL
This was one of those rooms that just wasn't for me. For one thing, I haven't seen Stranger Things, so (although I was able to understand the general idea) the various locations seemed kind of disjointed to me. More importantly, this game was obviously designed by somebody who hasn't hit middle age. A communication puzzle depended on a scratchy walky-talky that my middle-aged ears struggled to understand. There was a lot of squinting at things in dim lighting that my middle-aged eyes struggled with. At one point, I had to spend a long time kneeling while bending my middle-aged wrist at an uncomfortable angle. I wouldn't have minded if I found the puzzles delightful but I didn't walk away feeling like I had any amazing ""aha!"" moments. Maybe this is all just me (although I note that I have rarely encountered so many problems in any of the almost 100 other rooms I have played.) Whatever the reason, this just wasn't a fun one for me.
The Crystal Maze Live Experience

The Crystal Maze Live Experience

The Crystal Maze Live Experience

  • Escape room
  • Other
Note that this is not an escape room. It’s a recreation of the UK TV show The Crystal Maze, which is escape room-adjacent. Basically, it’s a collection of individual challenges, many of which are similar to things you might do in an escape room. Pros: •Fun, and does a great job of capturing the TV experience. •Some of the games are fun and elaborate. • Great maze master who was funny and positive and (I’m pretty sure) subtly gave the kids in our party extra time on their games to stop them from being discouraged. • Many games gave all team members the chance to participate by shouting suggestions, even if they weren’t the official player. Cons: • Very expensive— twice the price of a standard London escape room. I get why: real estate in Picadilly Circus must be insanely expensive, plus they have to pay for the licensing fees. But from a consumer point of view, it was twice the price I’ve paid for equivalent entertainment. • Some of the games are simplistic — think traveling carnival level. • They are really insistent that you bring a full team of 8; if you don’t, there’s a very good chance your team will get broken up and you won’t get to play together. With a total of 16 games, that means each person only gets to be the star of 2 games. • Difficulty of games is extremely unpredictable and you don’t get to see the game before assigning the player, so you can’t really assign people to their strong suits. This is entirely authentic to the TV show but it can make for a frustrating experience. OVERALL: If you’re a fan of the TV show and you feel the price is a fair one for a chance to live out the experience, go for it. But if you’ve got a fixed entertainment budget and you just want the greatest bang for your immersive entertainment buck, you’re probably better off with a trip to one of London’s many high quality escape rooms (eg Cluequest, Escape Plan, or the Game Is Now, to name a few.)
Avalanche

Avalanche

Maze Rooms - Robertson Blvd

  • Escape room
  • IRL
At one point, Maze Rooms spammed the Morty reviews for this and their other games with fulsomely positive reviews. Kudos to Morty for cleaning up the spam-- but I want to mention that this kind of behavior from an escape room company is a real abuse of players' trust, and makes it hard for me to get excited about their games in the future. Putting that aside, this was a vexing and perplexing game. Maze Room have clearly devoted real care into set design; the set pulls one trick in particular that was truly impressive. But they’ve skimped in weird ways. Hints are delivered through a walkie-talkie— and if you leave the walkie talkie in the wrong place, it ends up being inaccessible for the rest of the game, which means you can’t get hints. Plus, in a later room, doing the wrong thing to one prop renders it unusable, making it impossible to solve a particular puzzle. And then there's the storyline, which registers as disjointed for a lot of players. I think I understood what Maze Room were going for, and I appreciate the fact that they were trying something different. I liked the weirdness of it and I always applaud taking artistic risks! Unfortunately, I see where the complaints are coming from; the story just isn’t conveyed in an effective way. In short, this is a game with a lot of intriguing and promising elements, and is worth playing if you want to try something different and you don’t mind the potential for frustration. But it’s a severely flawed game, and I left feeling defeated even though we managed to escape in time.
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