Tomb Raided

Worst Escape Room I have ever visited. I have visited many escape rooms around the world, and they have all been entertaining to various degrees. This one, on the other hand, stands out as being literally the worst I have ever encountered. On the positive side, the atmosphere of the escape room, with its abundance of tactile and visual elements was quite stunning. I also really liked the idea of splitting the group into a single person in the "study" with the rest of the group starting out to re-unite with them. That's as far as the positive review goes, I'm afraid. The rest of the "game" was poorly designed and presented, basically an endless stream of laminated puzzle cards that were unimaginative, uninspiring, and tedious. We got just about half way through, and at the end the owner told us what "puzzles" remained. I was relieved that we didn't have to do any more of them as, frankly, they sounded dull. But the owner seemed to be excited by his own cleverness in explaining what was essentially an interminable series of four-digit padlock codes still to come. The biggest clue to how bad this game was was how often we had to ask for clues. One of our team members was disillusioned early on, and the clues didn't help. In a good game it should seldom be necessary to provide any clues, and indeed I rarely ask, but it seemed to be required regularly here. It also didn't help that the audio to the speaker in the game room was very patchy and intermittent. We managed to pick out a few words, which sometimes helped, but in general it was unintelligible. When we told the owner about this at the end he did not acknowledge the problem, instead just insisted that he had tested the speaker and it worked. I don't doubt that it was tested at some point, but when we were there it was barely working. I'll mention the red herrings in passing. No, they did not enhance the game. I'm sure the owner likes it every time some hapless customers waste time on a deliberate distraction. If the genuine clues were as easy to find as the red herrings I might have conceded that they were worth including, but basically they are a cheap, pointless gimmick, and make an already poorly designed game worse. Although it does make the name of the business very apt. How clever. The game could be redeemed by making the puzzles more varied, less obscure, and better integrated, but I suspect it will remain much the same. The owner seems to have missed the point of escape rooms entirely, which is to entertain. The customer, that is, not himself. I can afford to waste whatever it was I had to pay for this lame escape room experience, but I'm shocked that someone would take money for this game from anyone who was less affluent and was hoping for an enjoyable way to spend an hour with friends. In short, this escape room was just bad. It was poorly designed, poorly presented, and extremely poor value. I'm sorry that I wasted my time and money, and that my friends did too.