Crisis At 1600

This is tough to rate. A lot of people have strong opinions on “save the world” White House themed rooms, and it’s understandable as typically rely heavily on extraneous information and less about fun. Crisis At 1600 is “just barely” a thumbs up, teetering dangerously close to thumbs down for me. I’m not recommending this by a long shot because of the rating, but I’m also not saying it’s a complete wash either. Buckle up, this is a long one. The buildout is fine, and actually quite good compared to many other escape rooms I have played with similar themes. There’s not a whole lot to say besides that some of the rooms feel a bit more barren than others later, but it’s serviceable and accomplishes what it should. The gameplay has hiccups, pacing and logic wise. There’s plenty to do, not all the puzzles are bad, and there’s a few good ones that make it worth checking out for serious enthusiasts. It just feels that as the experience progresses, the puzzles start piling on more and more and it begins to feel more like work and less like fun. I would wager most would find the sheer amount to do insurmountable within the allotted time (and the work required to complete them). Most of the puzzles feel artificially long because the way they’re set up is designed to eat up as much time as possible as opposed to really utilizing your thinking skills. Again, not awful, however your opinion may differ by what you consider fun in an escape room. But if you’ve played “America’s Escape Game’s” other offerings, you’ll begin to feel some instances of severe deja vu. What should be a slam dunk theme and scenario for an escape room defaults to what unfortunately seems to be a series of puzzles copied and pasted across most of this company’s rooms, merely getting “rethemed” but in nonsensical ways. Cross word puzzles, endless organization of objects, papers with tons of exposition to absorb for objectives that shouldn’t take as long as they do. For the average (and even experienced) player, there’s too many puzzles with too much reading. We’ve played a lot of very hard rooms at this point. You will beat this by the skin of your teeth or you will fail, there’s no inbetween. As an aside, this experience has their lowest completion rate out of any of their rooms. Something like less than 2%. We barely eeked out a win by seconds. I suppose what’s most disappointing is when I think of “Americana” themed things and Presidential history, I expected the room to have puzzles that utilize something about said history. Instead you get a bunch of puzzles that feel immersion breaking and are not really well implemented to the story, (like I said, “copied and pasted” puzzles that get merely cosmetic changes). The one puzzle that DID actually utilize knowledge of domestic and world history takes SO long with the method they give you to find the answers (ie: a binder with two dozen pages and more reading), that if you didn’t already know the answers, you’re not beating this room. Had I not known every single answer by heart, we wouldn’t have beaten this room, especially with EVERY other task that was still to come. This one puzzle alone will easily take 10-20 minutes for without prior historical knowledge and would have killed any chance of an escape by that point in the room. After we beat the room, we figured out mathematically that you’d have to be solving each puzzle thrown at you in this experience in less than 3-4 minutes to beat this room with “comfortable” breathing room. Alright alright, we’re getting to the end. So should you play it? It really depends. I’d classify this as a challenge room and less of a fun room. It requires a lot of clear, concise teamwork, with each person tackling a different task and (hopefully) each person making great progress on their puzzles. Is it fun? My gut says not really. Everyone seemed more stressed out rather than having a good time. We really like hard rooms, but this was less hard and more laborious feeling and annoying. Did it feel good to beat it and save the world? You bet you patriotic butt it did 🫡

So much to read, liked the headshot part, organizing books suuuuuked.

Overall it was an immersive room and I’m glad I did it, but not one I recommend to others.