System Overlord: Dawn of the Machine

After my previous experiences at Keepers of Balance, I’m happy to report that System Overlord left me with no unresolved plot issues, missing keys, or lingering questions about aquatic villains. Growth. ✨ This room was FUN. Once again, the Game Masters were fantastic (even though at several points I very much wanted to throw balls at him). NOT metaphorically, there were balls. I had access to them. The intrusive thoughts were intrusive-ing. The System Overlord itself; however, was a little glitchy. We had to restart a few puzzles multiple times.(ok…more than a few times) If the objective was to simulate the authentic experience of slowly losing your mind while arguing with technology that refuses to acknowledge you’re doing exactly what it asked: 10/10. No notes. 👍 My only other suggestion? Give me more completely useless shit to obsess over. Put a lamp in the room. Make it look slightly suspicious. Give me absolutely no reason to believe it matters, yet somehow convince me that it is the key to everything. Make me want to pick that lamp up, inspect it, carry it from room to room for an hour, defend its importance to my teammates….and then discover at the very end that it was just a fucking lamp. THAT is the psychological warfare I’m looking for in an escape room. Overall, another really fun experience at Keepers of Balance. We escaped, the story made sense, and nothing was stolen from me by a melting villain.

This takes our #1 spot of 2026 and overall. Loved it so much!!! Great puzzles, great flow, facility is incredible and staff was phenomenal.

I loved Temple of Light. I liked Defenders of the Sunken Realm. This one just didn’t work (literally) for me. The first room was great. Set the atmosphere and presented the time period well. After that, it just didn’t work. It looks like there were puzzles that either didn’t work any longer or were removed. I asked the GM about one and she replied that it was “decoration.” But the puzzle had pieces in multiple rooms, so that doesn’t add up. The end was odd. I think the GM pushed us through because the mechanism we needed to use to escape literally didn’t work. We were making 0 progress and then the game was…. Over. “Congrats, you solved it!” Huh? Really? It’s a room you’ll do once and never think about again.

This was an amazing escape room. Super creative rooms that are just awesome. Staff was super nice as always. We’ve done all the rooms and are planning on doing the next one coming out early next year

I loved the other rooms here so much and had high expectations for this room. It felt like there wasn’t nearly as much thought and effort in this one as the others. We left kind of confused. This one wasn’t as immersive as the others and didn’t feel like you were entering a world as much. The other rooms set the bar so high, but even with that aside this was just a miss. Disappointing from KOB.

I love KOB and this room!! I know expectations are incredibly high from temple of light but I still loved this room. The puzzles are definitely harder than the other rooms at KOB. I enjoyed the challenge! The game was well set up and very playable I liked how much team work the puzzles involved! The last room was very cool! Our game master Trevor was excellent he adapted to our groups sense of humor and really went out of his way to make sure we had a fun time! Thank you KOB and thank you trevor!!!

This was a fun, if easy, room to play. It is probably the last impressive room at KoB when it comes to set design, but it it still manages to capture the atmosphere of the theme. I am not a big fan of the way they choose to handle the ending of the room, but it was unique and I am sure there are plenty of people who will love it. I feel like the biggest issue for this room is that KoB set the bar so high with Temple of Light that expectations for this room are probably too high for a lot of people. I know it was for us. This is not a room that I would have driven 18 hours to play had I known what to expect, but it is definitely a room I would play if I was already in the area.

Unique room

Great cut scenes - fun room!

The four of us really enjoyed this room. We still liked Temple of Light the best here but this was a close 2nd. Great theme. Fun puzzles/activities. Not as many puzzles/activities as some rooms but it was enough to keep all four of us busy for 45 mins. But, I would not want more than 4 people in this room. There was an in-room actor but she didnt really add much or participate much like the actors in the other rooms. Even still, Keepers continues to create awesome rooms and IMO this is a must do.