The local community of the Adirondacks has been rocked with a recent string of kidnappings. In what is normally a quiet and crime free region 10 people have gone missing in the past two months. Your camping trip that was supposed to be a weekend of fun has gone horribly wrong. You and your friends awaken in a rustic cabin of the high peaks serial killer can you escape before he returns home or will you fall victim to his sinister ways.

Locked A Rochester Escape Room

Cabin In The Woods

Escape room

Overall an extremely lackluster experience. 

The room decor is fairly barebones. No atmospheric sound or lighting. You just feel like you're in an office that has some wood paneling and a few things you'd find in a cabin, but with the Big Light on the entire time.

The puzzling was rarely clever or satisfying. Some solutions felt a little nonsensical, like you found the four numbers, but you need to put them in reverse because *reasons*. The room could definitely use a bit more signposting. 

And I hate to say it, but our GM really detracted from the experience as well. In general she seemed like she would rather be anywhere else. We came with a group of four with a wide range of experience, from first timers to 300+ rooms, but she never asked if we had done any rooms before (other than asking if we had been to their location before) and never asked how much/what kind of help we would like along the way. The result vacillated between feeling like we had been completely ignored to being way too hand-holdy.

On the too hand-holdy side of things, several times we received unsolicited help that was mainly just telling us exactly how to find the solution, rather than giving a clever nudge in the right direction. 

On the feeling ignored side: There is one puzzle that uses a *thing* tied to a string and is meant to be a teamwork puzzle with two players having different information to solve a puzzle, with the string preventing both players from having the same vantage point. Well the group before us had apparently untied the thing from the string. We played around with this thing a decent amount before actually getting access to the puzzle, and then the puzzle was solved fairly quickly because it was easily accomplished by one person. After the fact, the GM had come into the room and only then noticed the thing was untied and acused us of cheating. We all individually said "it wasn't tied to the string" but she still said we cheated. Yet at no point while we messed around with this untied thing did she step in to tell us to stop what we were doing so she could reset the puzzle appropriately. 

We also solved the final puzzle in an unintended way, by making out some numbers that were meant to only be seen with a black light. We spent a long time on this puzzle and I even said out loud more than once "it doesn't feel like this is how we are meant to solve this." but we did eventually solve it, and that apparently bypassed the second to last puzzle. So we "finished" the room with 19 minutes to spare. Our GM came in and saw we hadn't completed that one puzzle and told us that she could relock the final puzzle and resume where we were meant to, or we could just accept the final time and end the game now. I said "Since we already solved that final puzzle, instead of resetting it, can we just go solve that second to last puzzle without the whole reset, just so we get to experience it for our own satisfaction" and she seemed confused by the request and just ended the room. We've got 20 minutes that we paid for and haven't used, why not let us finish the puzzle?

After that, there was no debrief, no "any questions about anything" just a quick pic and a "hope you had fun" before we left. 

Some of our GM issues, I suspect, are just a personal problem, but most of it points to a lack of appropriate training or company culture.

We enjoyed our time!  There was quite of bit of time to interact with each other and the story.  The room was spacious for our party of 5. We would highly recommend!

Cabin In The Woods

Locked A Rochester Escape Room - Syracuse

Ratings

Reviews

ExpandedCircle

Mel9300

Gameplay

Atmosphere

Customer service

Particularly interesting or different

Story

Difficulty

Game tech

Ideal number of players

Scary

Minimum age

Was anything broken?

Live actors

Physically active

Easy to find location

Parking

Safety