Alien

It was a great experience. The staging and atmosphere was really eerie and isolating. It is non-linear so it was a bit harder than others but really cool.

Upon first walking into the room the overall vibe feels cool. The problem is that the room is in desperate need of refurbishment. Lots of parts of it were just falling apart. The GM did say someone had come and wrecked the room a few weeks before. The achilles heel of all of the Hourglass escape rooms is their awful hint system. I don’t think this should dissuade you from going and doing their rooms, but it will always keep them from being great. Having an active GM is so vital to an escape room experience, and Hourglass not working it that way sucks.

My biggest complaint is about the terrible hint system. Every other problem stems from that. They label all the locks to match the hints, but when you don’t necessarily know which puzzle goes with which lock, you could potentially end up like us and ask for a hint for a puzzle we hadn’t done yet then end up having to get another hint for what we actually needed one for. It just tries so hard to be non-linear but in a way that just makes it confusing because it’s really designed to be linear. Also, the room was cool to look at but several parts of it were falling apart. Some puzzles were fun, though. It has the potential to be a good room if they updated it and changed the hint system/removed the labels.

While this is a linear room, there was no clear indication of what to do next. In my opinion, this is a poorly designed room.