The Countdown: Covert Ops

I like this room, but it has a lot of problems. First off, this room is not "hard". This room is "bloated." I was excited to see Countdown finally reach Axxiom Newark, after spending over half a decade advertising the room as one of the posters on the lobby wall. (When's your turn, "Enigma's Sanctum". The entire lobby is painted in your color scheme, FFS.) The first glance of Countdown is intimidating but impressive. Monitors blanket the walls, an impressively complex desk console takes up quite a lot of floorspace and a very scary looking capsule towers ominously on the rear wall. While it can look overwhelming, there's a lot that's pretty straightforward (for now). We were able to solve most of the puzzles, though having a couple escape room newbies made things a little harder for us when we knew the answer to puzzles they assumed were more complex. It's no secret that almost every Axxiom room nowadays has a "second room" and seeing it wasn't a surprise. It's as plain as day, fully presenting as a door, instead of a false wall, a secret bookcase or a weird decoration that swings or falls away as you solve a specific puzzle. This room has puzzles that are a little less straightforward, but still understandable. It easily takes a bit more brainpower and logical leaps to understand what to do, but they are all done in interesting ways that feel rewarding when completed. The issue comes after this... The second room is themed as the "bunker" you take shelter in as the result of your actions in the first room. The puzzles within (mostly) make sense with the theming of where you are and what you're doing. (The rest of this is technically a spoiler for how the room carries out, but does not directly reveal the solution to any puzzles. It does, however, describe the oddity of the pathing, and reveals the important items to focus on within it. Feel free to stop reading here if any of this interests you. Just know that this room doesn't finish as soon as it feels like it would.) ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... We felt accomplished, as we hit the last puzzle and watched an animation of the bunker traveling upward, which felt like a logical conclusion to the room. Then we noticed the timer wasn't shutting off. The animation played on the monitors for what felt like over a minute, until the doors opened and revealed... another room. The tonal shift is absolute whiplash, and hit us in multiple ways. Annoyance, disappointment and confusion mostly. The vibe was nice, as calming music played and we were confronted with the look of a quaint Main Street village scene. A row of two shops lined the wall and the opposite wall contained a building with a single locked door. We had a very short amount of time left before completing the bunker, and thought that this surprise room had maybe one or two puzzles left. Our hopes were dashed as we realized this room was far more complicated than that. We completed about one or two more puzzles before time ran out. We asked how far we had to go when the timer expired and the game master explained nearly 6 more puzzles worth of instructions, with incredibly esoteric and nonsensical solutions that I don't believe we would have solved with 20 minutes left, let alone 6. This room is also narrative nonsense. A missile command center? Certainly. A radiation bunker in need of repair? Makes perfect sense. A quaint Mainstreet with a candy shop that requires you to line up horoscope symbols from the adjacent shop with a work schedule calendar, in order to know which candy jars correlate with the numbers in the employee logbook so you know what number to call in the phone book outside? I'm sorry WHAT? What did this room have to do with anything? Why am I trying to ESCAPE THE OUTSIDE by going INTO a building. We stopped the missile, we repaired the bunker. We were finished. There was no logic to why we were in the third room, or any logical starting point, as nothing in that room seemed like a clear threat that needed to be solved. Our entire group of 4 was convinced we escaped, because technically, we did escape the bunker, and sorting out the employee scheduling issues of a sweets shop didn't feel like it carried the same gravitas as the threat of nuclear annihilation. I don't know why this room is here, I don't know why there's so many puzzles in it, and I definitely don't know why the time limit is only an hour for this one. Mason's Temple in Axxiom Wilmington set that's room's timer to 90 minutes because almost no one was able to solve all of that rooms puzzles within an hour. Countdown needs to follow suit. I still recommend the room, despite the absolute nonsensicality of the final room. It's (almost) thematically perfect, and many of the puzzles in the first and second rooms are pretty clever. Just know that having less than ten minutes to solve the final room will likely be impossible, and having over a minute of that time wasted by an animation won't make that discovery feel any better. Either bump up the time, shorten the animation, or tighten up the puzzles, and you'll have something I'd recommend on the level of Sorcerer's Quest at this same location.

First Room is decorated to a tee, but a bit overwhelming when you are getting started. The puzzles weren't fun or well explained. I played with another adult and a child. There are quite a few loud and alarming effects that would have been nice to warn us about. We've enjoyed many rooms at this location, and don't regret the experience, but wouldnt recommend it to casual players. We definitely recommend a bigger group if you're going to give it a try.

It was a very fun room, and really mentally challenging, it was very fun and each part was rather unexpected but still fit together. I do believe a group of 4+ would have a really great time with this room and able to pace it appropriately. However, it is pretty much impossible with only two people and I felt a little discouraged because we were not told that. We did however get a MILLION hints at the beginning (before we felt we needed them) and then towards the end when we were struggling we got NONE and we could hear the GM resetting the part of the room that we couldn’t access anymore. After running out of time the GM expressed that they were VERY impressed we made it as far as we did, since no other group of two had made it past a checkpoint that we surpassed with 6 minutes left. My only other complaint is that some of the effects are SO LOUD that you can’t move on for almost a full minute but add nothing to the puzzles or gameplay, they add to theming and immersion but they could have been a bit more succinct. I waited to write a review because I couldn’t tell if I was bitter about not escaping or if it really was a damper on the experience.

This room was an insanely unique room that truly blew our group away! The storyline, set, and puzzles were incredible in their own way. For a group of 6 who are avid escape room goers, this room was one of the tougher ones. But once you got the ball rolling in each room you got your footing and went on! Fortunately our game master gave us an extra 5 minutes which was exactly what we needed. For a new local room, I’m truly looking forward to the future of this game!

I enjoyed this escape room and I ended up doing it for my birthday! Even with the max amount of people, my friends and I got stuck on the last clue. Even after we were explained it, we were still confused. Besides the last clue, this was 100% the coolest escape room I have ever seen.

we escaped right as our GM walked in. we were a group of 6 who are pretty good at escape rooms. if you have a smaller group or you're not so experienced, I would recommend booking two time slots so you have more time. overall, we absolutely loved the room.

An extremely difficult room, especially for smaller groups. Seems tailored made for groups of four or more to have success. Room is frustrating from start to finish; the theming is wonderful but the things you are doing are often times unintuitive and frankly not a lot of fun. The finale was a total gut punch, basically completely unclued and a disorienting change of pace. Our GM seemed very inexperienced and gave us hints that actively moved us further away from solving.