Time Machine

Overall Time Machine was our favorite room we have played at Countdown! It’s a simple premise but checks all the boxes for puzzle lovers. Very fun to progress through different decades. We had so much fun that we ended up playing almost all of their games. A special shoutout to Cally especially, for being a wonderful guide and hyping us up. My only complaint with countdown is that GMs run two rooms at a time which can lead to a little delay when clues are concerned and feel disjointed when one person intros, another person gives clues, and another person outros.

Another gem at Countdown! Impressive immersion, high tech puzzles, unique story, and fun interactions with the "AI." Lots of escape rooms are packed with a ton of generic puzzles, but this room certainly had quality over quantity and a good variety. Come see what makes Countdown so special!

I really enjoyed the theming of this room, and the grand finale was super fun. We spent way too long playing hide and seek, and it could've easily been avoided if our GM weren't running two rooms and were more attentive. The quality of this room is very impressive for the area as well. Definitely worth a visit!

We’ve tried this room 3 times and can’t get past one of the puzzles. Love the nostalgia though !

A wicked nostalgia trip with really fun sets. The final puzzle will surely have your whole team amped up. The best thong I can say is that the satisfaction this room gave my team was so sweet we immediately booked a second experience right after it. Pro-tip, our GM allowed us to use the Notes function on our phone for one particularly tricky puzzle near the end since they don’t provide a note taking device. Also if your team has 2 people and you want to do one of their larger experiences they will allow you to book it as a walk in for the price of two people instead of charging for the extra slot. (Assuming the game you want to play is open) One of the best meldings of good story and good puzzles I have ever played.

We left this room hyped, which is the best kind of room! It had some unique puzzles that were a lot of fun!

Very unique time travel room that I wasn’t expecting! The game plays out like a trip through sitcoms of the past century. Sort of like going through a family’s house through the ages. I equate it to playing through the Marvel TV show Wandavision, which is a big plus for me. The props and set designs have an authentic and nostalgic feel. Puzzlewise, there are a few gems based on pop culture fads of each decade you visit. Expect more TV/music instead of history or futuristic. But there are also annoying guess and check puzzles, as well as one that takes a long time and requires some outside knowledge or at least the ability to make inferences based on factors outside what is given to the room. It’s a weird and fun ending that feels out of place but I think many families will enjoy working through. A device broke on us and someone had to come in and manually fix it, which soured our experience. But we still really enjoyed our time travel trip otherwise.

This may be my absolute favorite escape room I’ve done. Countdown games is, hand’s down, the most immersive and novel rooms you will play. We have done murder mansion, pirate ship, and the scary one, but Time Machine was amazing. The puzzles are thought provoking, difficult but doable, and thematic. The set is so nostalgic and brings you back in time. Loved the final puzzle the most! Highly recommend if you want a fun family friendly fly game!

We wanted to love this game, and parts of it we did, but an inattentive game master and a bad puzzle ruined it for us. This game gets a lot of love in the reviews, and we get that. The set design is fun and nostalgic. Many of the puzzles are very enjoyable. However, as others have mentioned, there is a maze puzzle that needs to be done twice and the second time is more difficult. It’s a time suck, for sure. Besides that frustrating puzzle, our game master was either not good or very distracted. Before each game they inform you that the game masters run two games at a time. So their full attention is not on your group. Secondly, the game masters are in the hallways with customers walking by them to use the restroom or get to their games. So the game masters are constantly being distracted. With the three games we played prior to Time Machine we needed little to no help, so I have no idea if they were focusing on our game. Each game we played had a different game master. With Time Machine we had a few issues that could have been avoided with an attentive game master. On two different puzzles we had the correct solution. In the first puzzle the opening of the triggered item was not clear. In the second puzzle the lock was stuck and needed some finagling. In both cases we didn’t realize our original solutions were correct, so we tried the puzzles over and over until we asked for help. Our game master would ask us what we did and then give us instructions on how to do it correctly, which we had already done. In both cases we wasted over 5 minutes of our time. A good, attentive game master would have seen we’d gotten the correct solution the first time and stopped us from trying to re-solve the puzzles. Because of that and the horrible second version of the maze puzzle, we did not finish. On top of that, our game master would not show us the final puzzle (which is the only puzzle we had left). She said we’d have to come back and play the game again to see it. We had just played 4 games and 3 of those games were with five people. We spent A LOT of money here, but she couldn’t show us the last puzzle. It was a bad way to end our day at Countdown Games. I will say that our game master was friendly. The way the company has the game masters run the games (two at a a time in a distracted environment with only 15 minutes to take a group photo and reset for the next game, and not allowed to walk players who didn’t finish through the rest of the game) sets them up for failure when it comes to being effective.

Great room! The concept is well thought through and well executed. The puzzles are challenging but not impossible. Not very accessible though for those with impairment issues.