The Dungeon

This was a great room—great flow, on-theme puzzles, lots of surprises. What wasn’t great were the game masters or the vibe of this business. When we walked in, the guy kept forgetting what game we were doing, said he was going to give us a pitch on the room in a minute and then he disappeared. After a bit another girl came out, and without any greeting, explanation, or setup (including any rules, info about clue system etc) simply walked us into the room and started to leave silently. I called back to her and asked her if someone was supposed to give even the barest introduction to the room—of any sort—and she seemed confused and said we don’t do that here. When we finished the room, a different, equally silent girl ushered us out. On a minor note, the kids working there seemed confused and a little put out when we asked them if they had lockers for our stuff. They didn’t. I asked if there was a receptacle in the room. There wasn’t. And then after a moment of silence they sort of reluctantly said they could watch our bag. Very, very odd.

9/10

Several puzzles were broken or set up improperly. Game master had to come inside the room to inspect what was wrong and had to manually open several mechanical locks through the game. Game master was also not paying attention when we asked for hints and gave us clues we had already completed. Game master seemed unconcerned at the end: “I don’t know what to tell you.” They did not offer a refund.

I could see this being someone's favorite here. This has great verticality, some multi-layered (and multi-leveled ;) ) puzzles, and a good creepy vibe. This is one of the better "trapped in a serial killer's basement" rooms.

Had a blast. This room is a cool concept with a lot of fun puzzles. There are stairs in this room which does tend to split people up, so expect a lot of running up and down and splitting the group. Some puzzles were a little too straight forward for my preference. But the ones that weren’t made up for it for sure!

This room has stairs that you’ll have to go up and down frequently. So keep that in mind if you have mobility issues. Puzzle difficulty seemed pretty hard but that seemed like a common thing for this company. The blindfold and chains was probably the standout feature from this room, but it didn’t seem as themed as many of the other rooms we tried.

Besides being blindfolded and chained (what drew us to the game in the first place) in the beginning being a new experience, the whole experience was fairly new. Definitely need at least 4 people for this one, especially for the beginning. **Warning** Still just as hot as most of the Hayden rooms (besides the room, “John Hayden” — that one has air conditioning!). Another downer was that there were several mechanical errors that forced the game master to repeatedly revisit the room, which interfered with my experience of The Dungeon. It might have been one of my least favorite of the Hayden rooms because of it… There were too many messy elements.

This game was cool!! There were a few small malfunctions during our gameplay but the game master JJ handled them well!