Masquerade Ball Room

I played this room many moons ago but it still remains to date the worst room I’ve ever played, whomp whomp. I’ve done some duds; grandma’s masterplan, men in suits, magic kingdom, but wow this one was on its own level. I got a Groupon deal & it was on Groupon for a reason; it was cheap, broken + disjointed. I talked my coworkers into going & then I walked away like a clown at the end bc by trying to save us money I booked a lemon. I don’t want to be rude if the owners are somehow reading this, but considering this place is closed, I doubt they are. If I can be constructive, I think maybe the move would’ve been to not have 3 rooms at your establishment, and maybe instead just pool the resources into one quality room experience. And also, to try more escape rooms yourself because you should have a good idea of what makes a room good in the first place, even if you don’t have access to fancy tricks or robotics. From what I remember, there was some kind of mystery during a masquerade that you were supposed to solve - and that was 2 problems right there. A masquerade - the room was kind of just a suggestion of a vintage-y look that had like vaguely nice wall paper at best but was mostly kinda sparse. There wasn’t enough ballroom or Venetian glamour to suggest a ball or even a party - I think the concept of a masquerade is super cool for an escape room but you really gotta either commit to the bit and go full opulence rococo/victorian/Venice or change the theme bc otherwise what are you presenting aesthetically that makes it a masquerade? And the second problem - it was a mystery. Well lemme tell ya - there wasn’t really a mystery. I think you were trying to find someone who turned out to be a stuffed scarecrow body in the next room. I really value escape rooms that put story in their room rather than just a theme - it really brings the immersion full circle. I also love mysteries & figuring out clues and noticing details as I go. I realize that’s super hard in 60 minutes, especially when you’re also working to do puzzles, but maybe if we’d had some suspect character cards beforehand, or came across envelopes to open or even evidence? There was just barely any story and certainly no mystery. I could totally see this being a super fun experience in idea, but in execution there was just no way they delivered either the mystery or the idea of masquerade. I remember the puzzles being janky - that might be partly my group, who didn’t know what to do and therefore just kinda started poking at everything in hopes it would work, leading us to do stuff out of order - but that was also because stuff was super disjointed and didn’t make a ton of sense or come together cohesively, so yeah, we started poking. And the stuff that was there was really, again, barren and not impressive. Laminated papers and padlocks/keys. There was some explanation in story about the lights being turned off and then some kind of faint glow in the dark floor puzzle that was kind of ok, but mostly just got annoying being in the dark for so long, and I have to wonder if they did that to save on like set costs. There was also a some kind of piano puzzle that required you to play notes or something - that was also in the dark so it was super hard to see, we got way too stuck on it + then took forever to get a hint/solve it, & that’s with the experience of musicians in our group. It was a bad puzzle. Things were super beat up, the end room was a small little bedroom set that didn’t match the theme either, and I get that you can’t just stuff a highly realistic dead body in a room but the scarecrow dummy was really funny. It was made from white cloth and just kinda sagged at us once we got the wardrobe open. Total waste of my money+time sadly, but I hope if the owners someday try again they can do better.