Dr. Tyknee's Laboratory

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.