Deep South: The Butcher's Basement

This room is no longer available, but it was one of my better experiences here at Red Giant. The sets are a good size and quality, but it's got a lot of searching involved and not all the puzzles have intuitive solutions. They put an actor in the room with you to act as your GM, but he didn't really do much and made us feel a little awkward. First room is quite dark for no reason other than difficulty, the flashlights they gave us worked very inconsistently.

Deep South had great immersion before you even walk into the room. Not going to spoil anything. I am editing my review many months after we played. It is sad to see the room go. Was a great experience

Overall, the room was enjoyable. The theme is well done, and even having a live actor was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. However, these rooms are built for large groups of people. I personally don’t like doing rooms with groups bigger than 5. I felt like I missed out on half the room.

Tons of puzzles. Some issues. Expect I could play again without escaping.

I’m going to preface this with a few things. One: We played 3 of their rooms back to back on the same day. Two: I have played hundreds of escape rooms. Three: this review is based on my experience and has some of my personal preferences and opinions mixed in with facts. I like to break my reviews into multiple parts and provide each part with a sub-score from 1 to 5 stars and, in the end, provide a cumulative aggregate score based on all of the sub-scores. The areas that I review are as follows: - Pre-experience (booking process, rules and initial interaction, pre-game logistics) - The experiences itself (immersion, puzzles, story, game flow, set, cleanliness, clues, clue delivery system, actors, game masters, and room element functionality) - Post-experience (exit from the experience, picture, and wrap up.) 🗝 PRE-EXPERIENCE: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ So to start, I liked their website. It was easy to use and mobile-friendly. The booking software is Resova which is my preferred booking software. The room art and descriptions are nice and informative. Though I do believe they do a poor job saying on their website that you MUST bring 4 or more people to play, or it may cause issues. We didn’t find out until we arrived that typically you have to bring at least 4. We thought it was just a ticket minimum thing for financial reasons like other establishments, not gameplay reasons. We happily paid for 4 tickets even though there were only 3 of us. The parking was easy, and the place was easy to find. We were greeted by a kind staff member and a clean lobby and restroom. The video for rules was informative, and the waivers were easy. A few things that didn’t sit well with me: They give you free drinks if you write a review there on the spot. This caused inflated reviews and artificial scores. They have posters posted everywhere for weird micro up-sells for the rooms, like pay $90 to be a VIP for a room and get things, but it was vague and promoted you to ask an employee. Also, it had a variety of things posted to provide tips to staff which is just slightly tacky in my opinion, even though we ended up tipping everyone just to be kind, and they really pushed it. More on this later. Now, after the initial logistics, we locked up our things and had the info given to us, which was good. And we went into the experience. 🗝 THE EXPERIENCE: ⭐️⭐️ Let’s start with the good. I enjoyed the intro. You get bags put over your head, and it’s spooky. The set was above average in terms of production. There is a lot of square footage and multiple rooms, which I liked. Unfortunately, that’s about it. Now onto the bad. The room is dirty and worn. There was dust, dirt, and grime in many places giving off grubby vibes. There’s no reason for it to be dirty; the staff should be able to stay on top of cleanliness. There were many spots where the set could have used maintenance and upkeep with paint chipping and things looking dated and overused. There’s too much math. This location loves to use math in all of their rooms, and it kills the flow. Escape rooms should be done throwing in hard, pointless math as a puzzle. There are more creative and intuitive ways to create puzzles and game flow, and math isn’t one of them. There are too many locks. Mechanical locks are abundant and, at some points it, purely overwhelming. There’s an actor in there with you the whole time, and the actor is the game master, and they also give you all the clues you need. I don’t like this. They become another player, and your experience doesn’t feel private and messes with the group's vibe. We had to be walked through a lot of it because some things simply just didn’t make sense. We as a group have played hundreds of rooms, and there were many times we didn’t have any clue what to do, and we would receive help, and the help we got made no logical sense. The story felt fragmented and inconsistent. There were also tech and puzzle elements that didn’t fit the theme or story. They do this thing with red locks and red sticker dots that tell you not to touch something or mess with them; that kills the immersion for me. I hate do not touch stickers and things of that nature. It ruins immersion and is not needed. Don’t put things in a room you don’t want people to touch and hide your resetting access points to seamlessly integrate into the set as if they aren’t even there. I felt more stuck and frustrated than accomplished and productive, which often indicates a poor game flow and puzzle implementation. The experience lacked luster, was mundane, and at times frustrating. Heavily inundated with locks and big leaps in logic make the game hard to play and succeed. 🗝 POST-EXPERIENCE: ⭐️⭐️ The post-experience was fine. The host fell flat and didn’t really celebrate with us or as us any engaging questions like our favorite part or anything. But she did make sure to beckon us over to tip the actors, which felt forced and kind of awkward. We ended up tipping anyways but just felt tacky. The picture walls were nice. OVERALL RATING: ⭐️⭐️ out of 5 The primary factors causing the low score: 🔒 set cleanliness and upkeep 🔒 way too many mechanical locks, as well as way too much variety of the same type of lock, making it hard to open because they were hard to read or figure out. 🔒game flow lacks logic and constancy. 🔒puzzles were redundant, required a lot of reading, and a lot of help. 🔒game master in the room.