Permanently Closed - The gallery that you are in holds 18 master pieces in it! All you need to do here is to find and decipher the secrets; can you find the forgeries as well?

The Room Lisle

The Gallery

Escape room

The Gallery: Famous paintings adorned the walls and we were tasked with discovering the forgeries and solving puzzles to escape. 

Pros: There were three escape rooms at this place and clearly we love escape rooms.

Cons: Where to begin... Let's start with the game master. When we arrived, she proceeded to provide a 15 minute lecture on the DO NOTS of the room. These included the typical rules such as do not climb or break as well as a few we had never heard of before such as "put the clues back right next to where you found them so the staff doesn't have to work so hard in resetting the room" and "don't do any renegade moves." She went on to explain that renegade moves included jumping ahead. Now, it is our belief that in a well-designed game it would be truly impossible to jump ahead (lock-picking aside) so this has never been a problem for us. However, during and after our game we were indeed chastised for making renegade moves, much to our surprise. Apparently, we solved several puzzles "before we were supposed to" which to us was not a problem at all but to the game master was apparently a most vile violation. Our advice: if you don't want people to jump ahead, make sure there is no way for them to do so. It is all about puzzle design and good game flow. Besides that issue, we found the puzzles mostly tedious to complete, feeling more like homework than imaginative and fun puzzle solving. The same was true for both the Einstein Room and the Gallery. In the Gallery, we played with several children and were pleased to assign some of the more homework type puzzles to them rather than have to trudge through them ourselves. The sheer number of puzzles combined with the arduous nature of them made it difficult to escape in the time limit.  With no story lines, we didn't necessarily feel invested anyway and were not really sure why we needed to even escape.

really like this company...sad they are gone

The Gallery

The Room Lisle

Ratings

Reviews

Escapeologists

mmagiera1976

Gameplay

Atmosphere

Customer service

Story