Galactic Beef: The Cosmic Adventures of Star Cow

What Doldrick’s is trying to do in Galactic Beef is ambitious. They really took a swing on this one. Most escape rooms ask you to manipulate the physical world. Galactic Beef asks you to (mainly) manipulate a digital one. At least 90% of the game standing in front of screens, pushing buttons, turning knobs, and flipping switches. The idea is to create the feeling that you’re operating a futuristic control center. I love the ambition, but it never feels interesting enough to justify how much of the interaction is built around it. The novelty wears off long before the room ends. * The story’s humor leans heavily on animal puns layered over references to familiar science fiction conventions. Sometimes it lands. Sometimes it just keeps going. Crazy Train was brilliant… it had quirky animation, inventive puzzles, self aware and humorous dialogue. Galactic Beef reaches for that same blend, but too often it comes up empty. * It has the feel of a beautifully illustrated ’90s point-and-click game, where dialogue and cut scenes move you from one scene to the next. * The puzzles can feel repetitive. A similar jigsaw is done three times in a row. An exercise of picking the correct points out visual noise on a graph is done four successive times. Etc. When standing on a cement floor, the repetition becomes as much about endurance as puzzling.

The art work is amazing. The story is really cute and top notch. I’m a huge fan of strong-story/light puzzle rooms so I thought this was going to be right up my alley, but unfortunately it fell flat. The puzzles that were present were frustrating. I think some feedback would help if we got something wrong.

Fun little space adventure with intriguing puzzles. Be mindful (not a spoiler as they say it when the game begins): this is an extremely linear, story driven experience with cutscenes between puzzles.

Great room similar type of high tech room like Krazy Train

We really enjoyed this, even though it isn’t your typical escape room. It’s more about completing tasks to succeed in the mission. The video sections are a bit long, and there’s a lot of watching things on screens, but we still really enjoyed it. It probably would have been better to include a couple of rolling chairs so you don’t have to stand around!

This was not an escape room. The worst experience I have ever been to. Very Very. Long. Story telling took over the part of being immersive. No locks, no puzzles, no codes. All it had was switches to flip and Tv screens to look at. I yawned more times than I could count. Wish I could get the $55 and 2 hours of my life back. 0 stars.

I’ve seen the reviews. We very much enjoyed this one. It isn’t traditional and does have some screen time but I would say that’s more up front heavy. The screen time was absolutely relevant to the tasks ahead of you. That said, I understand everyone’s reviews are subjective and to each their own. We had a great time and think this was a fantastic production.

So here’s the thing, I played all of Doldrick’s rooms maybe a year ago and loved them. So much so, that I played all of them in one day. So when they announced that they were opening a new room, I was stoked. That being said, this is my least favorite room at Doldrick’s by a mile. This room is extremely tech heavy, which is fine, but it feels like the creators got so wrapped up in the tech that they forgot what an escape room is. I’ll start with positives. The set is cool, it’s a very small room compared to their other games but the space is used well and some of the tech was fun. Can’t stress this enough, I want to say more positive things but I can’t think of any. As far as narration, it was a cute little story. However, there is absolutely no reason for a 90 minute room to become a 120 minute room because of pauses for video narration. The game master had said that it was narration intensive, and that our game time would pause for the videos. It took us 88 minutes to get out. We checked the time when we got in the car, we had been there for 2 hours. There is little to no deductive reasoning or logic needed in this game. I can only think of one thing that required us to use logic. Everything else was “look at the screen and flip the correct switch”. I saw one user say that one jigsaw puzzle is too many, and three is overkill. Couldn’t agree more. Honestly we were really bummed about this room. There were also some “puzzles” (one of which was looking at one screen that contained a stylized graph and marking those points on a separate grid) we had to do multiple times, and by the 3rd time of repeating the same thing we were just bored and frustrated. Room is super tech heavy, there are no locks. That’s fine, but again I really feel that the creators were more concerned about putting together the narrative and the tech that they forgot what an escape room is.

This room was okay. The beginning puzzles were good, but I feel we fizzled out our excitement throughout for many reasons. Some puzzles were not very intuitive of what we needed to do, and the videos playing were longgg. Entertaining at first but got old and dragged on by the end