Galactic Beef: The Cosmic Adventures of Star CowDoldrick's Escape RoomEscape roomIRLSo here’s the thing, I played all of Doldrick’s rooms maybe a year ago and loved them. So much so, that I played all of them in one day. So when they announced that they were opening a new room, I was stoked. That being said, this is my least favorite room at Doldrick’s by a mile. This room is extremely tech heavy, which is fine, but it feels like the creators got so wrapped up in the tech that they forgot what an escape room is. I’ll start with positives. The set is cool, it’s a very small room compared to their other games but the space is used well and some of the tech was fun. Can’t stress this enough, I want to say more positive things but I can’t think of any. As far as narration, it was a cute little story. However, there is absolutely no reason for a 90 minute room to become a 120 minute room because of pauses for video narration. The game master had said that it was narration intensive, and that our game time would pause for the videos. It took us 88 minutes to get out. We checked the time when we got in the car, we had been there for 2 hours. There is little to no deductive reasoning or logic needed in this game. I can only think of one thing that required us to use logic. Everything else was “look at the screen and flip the correct switch”. I saw one user say that one jigsaw puzzle is too many, and three is overkill. Couldn’t agree more. Honestly we were really bummed about this room. There were also some “puzzles” (one of which was looking at one screen that contained a stylized graph and marking those points on a separate grid) we had to do multiple times, and by the 3rd time of repeating the same thing we were just bored and frustrated. Room is super tech heavy, there are no locks. That’s fine, but again I really feel that the creators were more concerned about putting together the narrative and the tech that they forgot what an escape room is.
ToxicityA Harrowing Escape - OrlandoEscape roomIRLOne of the directional locks was faulty. It did click closed, but opened with normal pressure. So it appeared to be locked. Game master couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so we tried a few different things and found that after the reset, it would just open without a code being entered. Luckily this did not mess up our game play too much. The code we got from opening that lock was clearly for the exit door, but having done many rooms we thought there had to be more to that so we left it be and moved onto the other areas. Like a “it can’t be that simple” kind of thing. No kind of apology from the game master, just a “that’s weird, have a good night”. Also, there are two little containers in the room. One for used locks/keys, the other for another item in the room. This room is not an extensive build, I understand some people may leave rooms in ridiculous conditions but this is a single room. I have had rooms with huge builds where we are just asked to leave the used keys and locks in the rooms we find them, that’s super reasonable. There is no reason to have players organize your locks for you in a room that small.
