The Dojo

Common theme for this room: WAY too many puzzles for a 60-minute room. You and the group will think you are doing well only to find out that you have about 10 more puzzles suddenly appear. Wife and I left disappointed and confused by the GM’s comment that the only people that have escaped the room have come and tried it a second time… if no one’s escaped… that likely means you haven’t designed the room right.

This is a mixed review for me. On the pro side, we have a beautiful set. The dojo is beautifully decorated and you definitely get the sense and ambience of the space. The second part of the game delivers on the aesthetics as well. I love the attention to detail they placed in the game. The puzzles were just as good as the decor. They were fun and they were implemented into the world. There was never a time where you felt that a puzzle was placed there just to be there. Speaking of puzzles, here is where the cons comes into play. There are two many of them. We busted our buns trying to get through the room and thought we were doing well until part two reared its' ugly head. We thought we were done and found a new task that easily has additional nine to ten puzzles to solve. We ran out of time with six more puzzles to solve. When we left the room the GM said hardly anybody ever got into the second part. This made me really mad. Ninety percent of part one is linear. Even if we had additional players we wouldn't have had much more time to complete the second part of the game. I'm my opinion, turn this into a 90 minute room and you will have a winner.

Awesome newish room with great feel. It is tough even though I have done a ton of rooms (played with one other person who was new). The id recommend at least 4 for people who’ve played before and more than that for newer players. We had a great time even though we failed

Dark themed. But consistent. Good props. Puzzles were perfectly mixed. We enjoyed it.

Interesting theme, lots of good puzzles. A couple of elements were frustrating as we felt like we did exactly the same thing multiple times until it finally worked, but most were great. We did not escape from this room but were so close to the end that we may not repeat, at least not for a while!

poor flow, didn’t love it. wouldn’t recommend.

First of all, I want to give a shout out to Peter, who was an awesome GM. This review is not a reflection of him at all. That being said, my husband and I did the Dojo and we left the facility feeling very disappointed. We have done 3 other escape rooms at Portsmouth (Westower's Study, Roswell Incident, Sunrise Killer) and 1 at their sister location, Ingenious Escapes. We have also completed 70+ rooms worldwide. The Dojo is a poorly designed room with wayyyyy too many of the same type of lock, poorly configured sensors, and no flow or cohesion. We were not surprised to hear that nobody has escaped in under an hour so far. That speaks less to the complexity of the room and more to the poor design. Since we escape often as a group of two, we are used to not getting out of rooms designed for larger groups, but typically the facility is aiming for a higher escape rate than zero... We left feeling confused and disappointed by the experience and hope the staff at Portsmouth spends some time bringing the room up to their usual standards. That being said, we were thankful to be given the extra 10 minutes so we could see the room through it's conclusion.

Fun but maybe too many puzzles - and some were a reach to come to the conclusion for.