Victoria Noir: Case of the Curious Collector

Tough to rate this one. Most of the game was really fun! Good puzzles, good flow. One fiddly part with suboptimal instructions, but it wasn't the end of the world. The problem is in the ending. The ending was a disaster. Read below for details if interested. So, ultimately, it was a fun hour! It's just more of a fun hour of solving random puzzles with no ultimate payoff than it is a true escape room. Without spoilers, the ending *should* be a logical deduction, but you don't have the information you need to make it. After the game, when asked how we were supposed to make the deduction, the GM said the information was in place X. We looked at place X all together, the information wasn't there. The GM apologized and said that the information must be in place Y. We looked at place Y all together, the information wasn't there. The GM said "oh, I'm sorry, I guess I don't know where that information is." The GM offered another hint at the deduction, along the lines of "person A is the only one who said thing B." We looked together, person A was not the only one who said thing B. The GM mentioned that you could figure out thing C based on situation D, which was true, but thing C didn't help you solve the final puzzle at all, so it's not clear why that would be relevant or helpful. We were kind of awkwardly laughing to try to keep the GM from feeling bad. We decided to stop asking and just start our thank-you-and-goodbyes rather than risk further uncomfortableness. Ultimately, it was unusual that the GM didn't know the answer, and it was more unusual that we still don't really know if there was a way to solve the overarching puzzle.

The escape room atmosphere and puzzles in the beginning was very fun and engaging. Towards the end of the room was more of a guessing game then solving puzzles.

Overall, this escape room started strong with creative puzzles and an engaging storyline that kept us entertained. However, the experience got bogged down toward the end when solving the murder turned into a bit of a guessing game. With a tricky mechanism that required piecing together six exact elements, it became more about trial and error than clever deduction. While we appreciated the challenge, the finicky setup and lack of feedback left us cycling through solutions without much clarity. It’s a fun room with great potential, but the finale could use some streamlining to keep the excitement going till the very end.