The Sorcerer and The Fountain of Hope

If there was a meh review I would give that, the puzzles were cool but multiple were broken and didn't work well. Room looked amazing tho

I'm sure this was a great room at one point but it's showing some real wear. Lightbulbs in a few spots were out. One core component barely worked and we had to retry it about 10 times. A few hidden areas are now not so hidden because of wear and tear at those spots. The theme and puzzles are great, it just needs a real maintenance pass.

ALL TIME RECORD! This was a solid room with some challenges in the expert mode. The room really unfolds with the story. Some really cool transitions, cool use of lighting, and cool set design. I felt like some of the puzzles could use some touch ups. The flow could be better also since we had skipped over and came back to some elements. Overall good room.

I’m not sure why this was a terpeca nominee. It didn’t flow well. It was not intuitive. Some of the pieces were broken. The game master was not very helpful. I was disappointed for sure

Visually strong and generally enjoyable. That said, some puzzles suffered from wear and tear, which blurred the line between challenge and confusion. Early sections leaned too much on mechanical trial-and-error rather than real problem-solving. But after that, the room found its rhythm.

My party of 2 did not get out due to many of the puzzles being broken. We would ask them to please trigger the given puzzle because we solved it and they said they couldn’t. We asked them to explain the puzzles that “didn’t make sense” (were broken) after the game and the game master (who really did not want to be there) would shrug his shoulders and say “idk, no one really plays the game on expert mode”. It was a very, very disappointing experience and this is from a purist when it comes to escape rooms. I have left 1-2 bad reviews in my life.

Overall, we had a fun time and the room was immersive. Of the two we've done at GSR, this is definitely the better of the two, probably because we did it with fewer people. It felt very linear so I'd probably do the rest of the rooms at this location just myself and my husband if we were to find ourselves wanting to play rooms. As others have stated, some of the room is in disrepair which kind of takes away from the experience (in one instance, it made it hard to find the puzzle. In another, it made it easy to figure out what parts weren't needed for a puzzle.). The GMs were kind enough, however, it took them way too long to realize that we were missing a piece of paper we needed in one part, although they did give us time back which was cool of them. There were also two parts in the very beginning (puzzles like 2 and 3) that I wouldn't realllllly classify as "puzzles" that just took us too long to figure out due to it being more mechanical and not really puzzley. Once we got past those, though, we did pretty well getting through the room (despite not escaping on expert mode, we were about three puzzles away).

The theming was great, but the room is not maintained and many puzzles are broken. We thought we had messed up on a puzzle and wasted about 10 minutes redoing over and over, finally trying to brute force it by trying every possible combination, only for it to still not work. We then tried to call the GM through the communication "crystal" and that didn't work either. I had to push the emergency escape button and track someone down to get any assistance. The staff were on their phones in a break area when I finally found them. When they did assist they told us our first combo was right, when we showed them it didn't work, they manually progressed us and said "sorry it's been acting up." They did give us back 15 minutes due to the issue which was nice. At one point we got a key, that was delivered through a drop mechanism - the key snapped on impact with the catch tray. Multiple puzzles had little to do with the theme, and some of them required massive leaps in logic to get to the solution. It would be a good place if the room actually worked ...

GM is so unfriendly that I didn’t want to complete any puzzle from the beginning (host is more like an AI? Memorizing things rather than explaining. Also we asked if there’s a restroom, they said no. We have to ask “where can we find the restroom” to find one. That’s ridiculous.. Puzzle is ok, more like completing tasks than solving things. For me it’s an avoid, I won’t go to any other rooms here… check out other places, they are better.