The Great Houdini Escape Room

The Great Houdini was easily one of the best puzzle-room experiences I’ve ever had. From the moment we stepped inside, the atmosphere matched the story perfectly and made the entire experience feel immersive. The puzzles also made sense within the theme, which is something I really appreciate in an escape room. One thing to know going in: there are A LOT of puzzles in this room. My team of seven definitely struggled at times because there was so much to work through, but that honestly made the experience even more memorable. We were constantly communicating, splitting up, and trying to figure out what to tackle next. Even with the moments where we got stuck, we had an absolutely fantastic time. The room kept us busy from beginning to end, and there was rarely a moment where someone didn't have something to work on. Overall, The Great Houdini is one of, if not the best, puzzle-focused escape rooms I’ve ever played. Challenging, immersive, packed with things to do, and incredibly satisfying. If you enjoy rooms with a high puzzle count and love having your entire team constantly engaged, this is an absolute must-play. 5/5 – One of my favorite escape room experiences so far!

Palace Games has excellent rooms based on the Palace of Fine Arts’ opening year in 1915 and historical people and events around it. This is their earliest room, and while still great, does show its age. It’s not as tech savvy and advanced as other rooms here. And a lot of puzzles are completed on paper or laminated sheets. There is a certain magic to the theme, which is ironically less about Houdini than it is about 8 of the greatest minds of the time including Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. There are fun reveals and moments, but they admittedly don’t have the spectacle of actual Houdini themed magic rooms. And they don’t reach the heights of their other excellent games either. But there is a charm to this room, especially if you have a larger group to tackle the 8 people’s puzzles and pay the hefty $400+ entry fee. Smaller teams will still need to pay the same price, and while a great room, the price is quite high for this specific room. So it barely ekes out a love for me for the game’s history and interesting puzzles. But I would highly recommend Edison or Attraction over this for most escape artists.

Such a wonderfully polished game with unique puzzles, great tech, and silly/fun story line. I love rooms with a bit of humor. The feedback was incredibly well done. It's an impeccably designed room. I have no complaints.

The puzzles were well designed and parallelizable. There was a good amount of puzzles that required holding clues until the relevant cue revealed itself, which I personally like. My chief gripe with the experience was that certain puzzles were finnicky in their mechanical design such that you would have to configure them multiple times despite conceptually having solved them.

The gameplay did not flow well. You’d start working on one puzzle and not be able to make progress or finish it because the remaining parts would be in a later room, but you wouldn’t have known that. Multiple puzzles were available up front but wasn’t clear that they had to be solved in a certain order. Some puzzles were not intuitive at all.

Tier: A (bordering on A+) (see bio) Like all of the Palace Games, the gameplay is very intelligent. Every puzzle has multiple steps with some layering on top of each other making you think in ways you’ve never thought before. Being the oldest here (and one of the oldest operating games in the country to my knowledge), Houdini is very much the most “basic” of the 4, however, that does not mean it doesn’t have a lot of stand-out elements. The way the puzzles are laid out is very unique from any other game I’ve played, allowing the team to easily split up in certain areas to solve a lot of smaller puzzles and uniting them to solve huge room-spanning tasks in other places. All puzzles also tie to each other in ways I’ve never seen before and the game expands in very unexpected ways. Like all of the original 3 Palace Games, it is definitely a puzzle-based game, with what little major story there is being told through an overly-long game intro. The hints are also delivered by in-person gamemasters which is always an immersion killer. Also, how you have to get around the set in the game’s second half gets very annoying quickly and there could have been much easier ways to get around it. But this game is extremely fun, and is a very worthwhile game to play. Palace Games Ranking: 1. Edison (true immersion through puzzles) 2. Attraction (true immersion through… immersion) 3. Roosevelt (Houdini but more of it) 4. Houdini (still one of my favorite games)

Fun room! I love the puzzle quality for this room more than the attraction. There was plenty for everyone to do. Very very searchy room!

I had a great time with this room, and it held up really well despite being their oldest room. The puzzles were extremely parallelizable (we had four ppl which was a perfect size imo) and enjoyable. Story wise it wasn’t anything special. There were still a good number of scavenger-hunt-type things in the room (find all the pieces to XYZ), but to a level that I enjoyed. The things that keep this from being a heart for me are that a lot of the puzzles are pen-and-paper-esque, and that the room isn’t as immersive as other rooms. But I really liked it, overall super solid room that I’d recommend!

Great for an older room. Upper end of thumbs up bordering on a heart for me. Theme and puzzles were very solid! There’s a LOT of individual pieces you have to find for this room.