Pirates of the Dark Sea

My friend and I came back for Pirates of the Dark Sea at 1:30pm on a Sunday. The room itself was one of the worst escape rooms I have ever done (2 stars), but overall, I am rating the franchise 3 stars. Many of the points I will bring up are also in Matt M.'s critical review below. TL:DR - This franchise struggles with logical sequencing. Also, if you are trying this room be aware that there is a point where you could hit your head on something. My friend did and the pain lasted for over a day, so be aware! Pirates of the Dark Sea is marketed as one of the hardest rooms. In my opinion, it is difficult because nothing makes sense, not because it is actually hard. I had two points of extreme frustration before I was so done with the room. The first was when the clue master took away a clue for something that we were already doing. It involved slightly shifting pieces to align them, but it's not like we did not know what to do. Then, the clue master gives us another clue that is WRONG. I wish I could tell you what it was without spoiling, but alas. I hate rooms where you need a clue master to get out, and that there are so many red herrings and no direction what to do. I had similar critiques of the Illusionist, but there were some puzzles in there I enjoyed, and it was not as bad as this one. However, after seeing the same issues repeat themselves, I feel more confident in saying that it is an issue with the franchise. After we broke out, the clue master told us he was surprised we kept saying we weren't going to get out, since we were apparently "ahead of where we needed to be." I felt so lost during the entire experience, so this comment eluded me.

This could have been an amazing room if the clues led you in the direction to solve the puzzles. We would open a puzzle and the. Stand around not knowing where to go for the next solution. One of the clues had a riddle but nothing telling you exactly where I. The riddle to look for the answer. The wing was great although a small room I would recommend no more than 4. We were 6 and had 2-3 of us standing doing nothing sometimes.

The elements of the room were truly excellent, but gameplay really suffered because of the number locks that were unrelated to the storyline. We burned multiple clues when we were at dead-ends, only to find out the next step was a number lock that left us scratching our heads.

We had a not so great experience at one of the other rooms at Just escape so we decided to try another room to give them another chance. This room was one of the worst experiences I have ever had in an escape room. We had tech issues where multiple items were not triggered - and we had to have our GM come into the room to manually trigger which ruined the flow as we weren’t sure what the GM opened has bypassed. There’s also a portion of the puzzle where you need to listen carefully and the volume was either so low OR the drilling from a new experience they were creating was so loud (which definitely ruined the immersive aspect) we could not hear. We won’t be coming back to this location.

I completed this escape room back in 10th grade and I wouldn’t call it difficult but I wouldn’t call it easy. I thought it was the right amount of challenge and the pirate theme was really cool.

It was a fun theme. Nothing too special about the puzzles

Its a classic Pirates themed room. Nothing too special. Certain puzzles were really particular about placement. There were so many combo locks you didnt always know which code was for what