Inventors Work Shop

I’ve rarely had a bad escape room experience, but this room was just awful. My friend and I went in with a positive outlook, as we had previously played the Pharaoh’s room at the same location and found it enjoyable. However, problems arose as soon as the room began. First, the audio on the TV introducing the game and rules was either broken or simply non-existent; we relied on subtitles, which were horrible and often made no grammatical sense. Then we had issues with certain puzzles not working technically. After basically receiving a hint that was the answer, we confirmed that was the solution we came up with and suddenly the puzzle ‘resolved’ itself and we were able to move forward. But by far the worst experience was interacting with the employees and the room’s hint structure. We were told that to get a hint, we should wave our hands at any camera and ask for help. We did this for a first clue and after five minutes with no help, I had to physically leave the room. The employees were helping a different group set up a virtual reality game, so I simply waited and then asked for assistance. But when we needed a second clue, we waved to the camera; after TEN minutes of waiting and asking for help, I had to leave the room again - only to find that the employees were at the end of a long hallway, chatting with each other and no one was in the ‘control room’ monitoring our game. There was a moment in the game that should have been an exciting turn, but the overall set design just made it underwhelming. The puzzles for this room were mediocre (and as stated above, some just didn’t work, even though it was correctly solved). Quite a bit of time is wasted listening to long audio bites and there is no way to skip these; you need to listen on repeat if you miss anything. The puzzles were also not intuitive - there are leaps of logic needed to link certain puzzles together and there was no in-game context as to why they were connected, which was a great disappointment. Overall, there are plenty of other escape rooms to enjoy in Massachusetts that have better sets, stories, and interactions between player and game master. I would not recommend this room.