Chaos Kitchen

Chaos Kitchen is a puzzle fest! There is an overabundance of puzzles, so if that’s your jam, you’ll have a great time in this room. If you’re the type of person who loves to be involved in seeing and solving every puzzle, you may not be satisfied with a single visit. At the end of the experience we were shown a leaderboard, and most (if not all) of the teams on top of the leaderboard got their position after replaying the room. This was one of the few escape rooms that provided enough puzzles for everyone in the group to be actively involved in solving things simultaneously. The gameplay of this room was quite different from what’s found in traditional escape rooms. Even with instructions it took a moment for my group to understand the structure of the gameplay, but found our flow shortly afterwards.

Chaos Kitchen is the perfect name for this game because that is what it is. Not setup in the usual escape room format, your goal is to get as many recipes completed as you can. The game is designed from replay-ability in that sense. However it just ended up being SO overwhelming as the premise wasn’t very clear at the start so it let to the first 15mins feeling unclear as to how we progressed. Once we understood and got into a game flow it was really fun and challenging. We did run into problems where the tech wasn’t working properly for the inputting of the codes. I understand these things happen but it didn’t dampen the vibe of the game. I was super disappointed to see how much AI generated images there was in the game, it’s so disappointing to see that used in a creative industry. Overall it was quite frustrating despite having a great premise and some interesting puzzles. I’ll definitely come back to it though once some of the kinks have been worked out.

My personal preference heavily favours this type of room where you have a billion puzzles right from the start and you are just expected to go in and make sense of it! “Chaos” is true to the name where down to the last second we were finishing “recipes” and yelling just like in the video game “Overcooked”. Loved this room overall. Big fan of the immersion, the mixed level of difficulty of the puzzles, and the first time in a long time that I want to try a room again to do the other 75% of the puzzles I wasn’t involved with. I think both beginners and escape room enthusiasts would have a blast in this room. With that comes potential downsides, your outcome is not “escaping” but rather trying get the most recipes done in the 60mins. So definitely go in with that mindset. Our group still had lots of recipes not done but still got 5stars so unless you have a group of 8 I don’t really think you are expected to finish it all. Our group probably would have benefitted from that warning before we started. And I can see the sense of “incompleteness” not sitting well with everyone AI use always makes me sad. There were lots of photos that appeared AI generated and many spelling mistakes. Somehow the computer screen said “CHOAS KITCHEN”….makes me concerned about quality control for future games. Another thing is there are A LOT of audio based clues that needed you to either listen carefully or when the audio played kind of overwhelmed the room. So it created a weird dynamic where I wanted to play some things again but also didnt want to disrupt others working on their puzzles. But really that’s my only game mechanic issue, rest of the room worked smoothly and was fantastic.