Escape Hour Edmonton — Attraction in Central Core

Me and my girlfriend are escape room connoisseurs. We have done EVERY room at Escape Hour and let me tell you, we enjoyed every single one in different ways and I will tell you our experience and ratings on each room.

5 Lives - 10/10: This was the first room we did when we checked out Escape Hour for the first time. We were looking for a more physically demanding room and boy did this meet our expectations. The dark part with the drop in the beginning was what caught me by surprise and the different levels that involve (crawling, climbing and etc.) we loved it.

Five Elements - 8/10: This was another one of my favourites out of the bunch. The amount of different interactions you have to do (especially at the beginning) was amazing. The games master gave us a small “claustrophobia” warning at the beginning but if you’re claustrophobic, it’s not bad and I highly recommend you do the room. I especially loved the ending.

The Matrix - 9/10: I played as Neo while my girlfriend played as the captain, or leader. I love the amount of teamwork that is involved in this room, almost the entire time. Lots of amazing different challenges and puzzles around the room, we especially loved the room with the chair in it!

Senators Battle - 7/10: This room is a battle room technically but can also be played as an individual room (we did individual because we’re only a duo). This was actually more of a challenging room for us, at first we were confused on where to start but after we got a little help from the games master, they led us on the right track to success! I love the brainwork involved with the tools you are given.

Bank Heist - 10/10: By far the most difficult room, as they warn you from the beginning that it’s very challenging. We still accepted and tried as a duo. This one was the only room we failed first try - we loved it so much we came back the next day to finally complete it. We loved every second of it, by far the most teamwork demanding room for sure. We love the vault part and finding the correct way to get in. Super immersive and by far the best room (aside from 5 Lives).

Tron Room (Beta) - 9/10: We completed the second attempt of Bank Heist in 13 minutes out of the hour we had so we wanted to do another, but we already completed all the rooms except the Tron room. The games master told us that he didn’t want us to feel underwhelmed by the room not being finished but we insisted on doing it anyway. Even though it’s not finished we still enlisted it a lot, very immersive and the puzzles were awesome. (You even get to play a mini game against your team mate!) . Highly recommend coming here, we have done every single room and I hope the owner recognizes us !! We love your business and want to come back...

The escape room was really interesting, challenging, and exciting for the entire group that went! We tried the bank heist room and it surely had us freaking out thinking the “cops” were going to catch us any second!

The staff were awesome, polite, informative, and helpful in the best ways! Especially when we asked for hints they gave them in a way that still made it challenging and fun but because of their help we were able to complete the challenge and make it out of the room with just minutes to spare!

There is a photo op at the end, the staff are awesome there too taking photos for you with your phones and they turned out great so that was a cool memento we didn’t expect!

Prices are very reasonable for an “Escape Experience”, we spent 28.80 per person and had a blast for the hour we were in the room. They have a few different rooms that I’m excited to check out soon.

One thing I will say is that the mall they are located in, the City Centre Mall needs to be better towards this business. We had a booking at 6:45pm and the mall itself closes at 6:00pm. It took us begging the shoppers drug mart staff to let us walk through their actively closing store, then we tried taking an elevator to the 3rd floor to get to escape hour but you can’t take the elevator you have to take the escalator only (or stairs) there is no elevator access to this level that we were able to access after 6pm. We were sprinting around up and down floors trying to figure out where to go as nobody in our group had been before.

When we arrived I was frustrated about the difficulty in locating the place, and thankfully the staff member was patient and understanding (I was definitely upset and it was not their fault though they are the ones being blamed for the mall’s actions). The staff member told me that the City Centre mall won’t leave any extra doors open, won’t leave the elevator access open, and won’t even allow Escape Hour to put up signage to direct people towards their location!! It seems like the City Centre mall is not only willingly sabotaging business within the mall, but also due to the lack of elevator access it also feels very unsafe and unfair towards low mobility and less able bodied people who try and visit the mall after 6pm.

I really hope City Centre mall fixes this. If you are planning on going to Escape Hour after 6pm, you MUST USE the East Parkade entrance of the City Centre Mall. That is the only one that gives you access to the mall after 6pm, and then you MUST use the stairs or the escalator to get up to the third floor to where the Escape Hour is Located.

Very long winded review, but really good escape room, unfortunate location, awesome...

We did the Five Lives room, which turned out to be a massive ripoff. The areas looked intricate but almost every time, you had to ignore everything that actually looked useful. One room had an interactive item that was clearly meant to look like you're supposed to use it to proceed but actually served no purpose, and there was another room where we were shown a bunch of red herrings that were clearly made to look important (with no useful stuff alongside it) and found items to reveal information that also served no purpose (in both rooms, the process to proceed to the next room was extremely simple, and the vast majority of the decorations/obstacles/information given was useless). There was also a point where we were explicitly told to do a task that ended up serving no purpose and to look at information that also did nothing. There were two other rooms where you just had to walk out without doing anything special (one of which was extremely deceptive and very much a letdown when we found out the "solution", since it looked a lot more fun at first glance compared to how we were supposed to do it - but that was also the case with everything else in this place). One of the puzzles had a component that was unnecessarily difficult to use and the other component broke halfway through; at one point the puzzle became literally unsolvable so the staff had to provide us with an alternate way out. The puzzles were very linear as well (especially since most areas only contained one puzzle).

There's one point where it's pitch black and you have to feel around, and my friend got a big wood sliver from splintered wood that he couldn't see - extremely unsafe (not to mention the other places where it would be very easy to fall and hurt yourself, including a big drop into almost pitch darkness where you can't see/feel the floor, which also resulted in an injury).

On top of that, the storyline made no sense (or maybe it just wasn't explained well) and just seemed like the creators came up with a bunch of unrelated themes they wanted to try, smashed them together, and tried to build a flimsy story around it. Five Lives was built for appearance first and experience/functionality/safety second. There are more red herrings than actual puzzles, and the puzzles that are there are too simple/straightforward (think pressing a giant red button on the wall to escape - that was what some of the rooms felt like).

The only decent quality here was that the physical elements (crawling, climbing, etc.) were pretty fun, but the unsafe parts took away from it and that still nowhere near justifies wasting your time and money on this place. Avoid...