Mad Lab: Resurrection

There’s a good mix of puzzles. A few were pretty clever and interesting to me. I usually hate it and feel uncomfortable when there’s an actor in the room, but the GM Kevin’s acting was amazing and made it feel less awkward.

This room is bordering between disliked and liked for me. I did this room with 6 people, 4 of which were basically beginners and actually did not help at all. We had to use 2 hints, and you only get three. I think that all of the puzzles were possible to do without hints. However, from my memory of this company before they moved to this location, the rooms tend to have a significant number of red herrings. Probably 75% of the items you have access to have no relation to any of the puzzles. This isn't bad if you're experienced, but with beginners, this made things very confusing as multiple incorrect passcodes were attempted. One annoyance I had was that one of the rooms had bad lighting and I definitely had a hard time telling what color something was, which was critical to the answer. I think that area should definitely better light. The room itself has pretty averagely themed. Not amazing but with all the red herrings, it was just pretty average. The tech is pretty much right in-between high tech and mechanical. Regarding the "live actor", the reason why the other review complains is that they didn't understand that the live actor is really just your game master with a costume on. She's just there to make sure rules aren't broken and give clues when needed. Which I do agree is pretty awkward as compared to just having them watch from a camera. Another thing I think the game master was supposed to do was "quarantine" our players, but I think that they might only do that when you have a lot more people and they need to entertain. One thing that I dislike that she did was kinda interfere and give us an unasked hint by telling us to write some codes down quickly since they were timed. I don't think she had to do that since we still had a decent amount of time. Lastly, one of the locks gets a bit stuck so she was already there to help open it. Super friendly though. All in all, somewhat below average room, but still fun.

Mad lab just isn’t very good. The environment was cool and on theme, but a lot of the puzzles lacked logic and just weren’t fun. Nobody likes to make leaps in order for things to make sense. Also, they claim to have a live actor, but in our game, it was just a lady dressed up as a scientist with a mustache who stood in the corner and didn’t move. For a whole hour. Very strange. We have been to amazing rooms with incredible live actors before, and this was very disappointing.