CipherX Coquitlam | Escape Room & VR Lounge — Attraction in Coquitlam

Just reviewing the free-roam virtual reality:

My buddy & I went to try out the free-roam VR the other night. When we walk-in to the venue I was very impressed with the aesthetic of the facility, it looked super cool and was obvious that no expense spared to create the best experience for its customers...until you get to what we paid to play, the free roam VR. It looked like they turned a tiny squash court into their "free-roam arena" but the arena in real life was smaller than the perceived play arena we saw in our headsets. In the lobby where your group waits into to vote on games there's a basketball hoop to shoot on and i kept banging my hand against the wall trying to grab the basketballs. In the burger cooking game, I kept banging my hand against the wall trying to reach for a plate to put the burgers on. Throughout our hour at the facility my friend and i would crash into IRL walls and even the ceiling while playing because the game arena in our headsets was larger than the IRL play arena. It seems pretty dangerous. One of the walls we kept hitting is lined with glass sided computer towers. What if someone puts there hand or worse their head through the side of one of the towers. We are fairly experienced VR players to the moment we figured out the real space we had to play with was smaller than what it looked like in game we had to be cautious which took away from our enjoyment of the games we were able to play. The main issue i had was not feeling safe in the games. The second issue i had was the unprofessionalism of the staff. The girl that got us setup our gameplay didn't seem like she knew what she was talking about and she left a couple extra headsets on that slowed down the game selection process. We had to take our headset off and track down on the the staff to let them know that the couple headset were left on and was hindering the experience. She said it didn't matter that they were left on but we knew it did. We had to wait 60 seconds during the game voting process for the two headsets to essentially get timed out but once it was down to just the two of us, it was just a 5 second wait for the game to start after we both had voted. When our hour was over, we just stood in the waiting room not knowing what was going on for a few minutes. No one came to prompt us that our time was up. We just had to take our headsets, check the time on our phones, leave the headset and controllers on the concrete floor and find our way our to the front of the venue. Overall a painful experience...both figuratively...

Reviewing just for the free roam VR:

The facility itself is pretty cool so I give them some credit for that, but everything else fell short for me. I played free roam VR with a group of 2. Right from the start we were given incorrect instructions on how to operate the equipment. Fortunately the two of us are seasoned VR players and we knew how to play despite the unclear and incorrect instructions. Upon entering the lobby, we noticed that the staff had turned on extra headsets and let non-controlled players linger in the game lobby, delaying the game selection process. Inside the first game, the non-controlled players were in the game, blocking off what we could see and interact with. We had to remove our equipment and inform them at the front desk of the issue. They told us it shouldn't matter and we can keep playing, but we insisted that they fix the issue. The equipment used is an older Vive setup, so the tracking was terrible and the games had a hard time locating our hands. The boundary mapping was done very poorly and led to us constantly bumping into walls throughout our 1 hour session. Sometimes the boundaries were so off that there were game ineractables OUTSIDE the arena that we couldn't reach. (Fire extinguisher in Cook'd Up, buttons in Espionage Escape).One of the walls of the arena has computers and shelves sticking out nearly into the arena. I hit my head on one of these computers and got a headache. The headsets lost tracking and went into a pass-through mode several times for each of us when we were in the centre of the game arena.

In summary, the arena is very poorly set up and potentially dangerous to play in. I would not recommend anyone play here over any other VR facility. As far as Free Roam goes, it is vastly inferior to Zero Latency VR or Sandbox VR.

The staff were very kind and polite, if seemingly inexperienced with...

So disappointed. The Coquitlam location was filthy. The entire place was full of dirt and grime build up in every single corner. It felt sticky and grimy everywhere.  All of the windows were full of greasy Fingerprints both inside and out. For all of the viewing rooms, doorways and windows, nothing seems to have been windexed in weeks.  For the party room we booked for my son's birthday, there was a dried up croissant, scrunchy hair tie, and full of crumbs and food particles on the counter. A piece of pizza under-the-table and we were the first party of the day so this was from the day before. So gross. The little fridge in the party room Had spilled sticky food all over it. Somebody's container of butter, salad dressing and other lunch materials left from someone else in it. Gross.  The whole thing was disgusting. I didn't even want to put any of our party Food or supplies on any of the counters and the gentleman who was working that day seemed like he couldn't have cared less when I pointed out all the dirt and the grime and the grossness of everything he looked at me like I was from Mars and barely even cared enough to come and wipe the crumbs off the counter which I had to repeatedly ask if he could clean so we could set up.  We had the VR room game package for 6 kids as well and one of the headsets kept glitching and malfunctioning throughout the whole hour game repeatedly. The whole thing was such a disappointment for almost spending $400 for a 8 kid party.  Definitely won't be recommending to any of my friends or family. So so so very disappointed. What should have been an amazing exciting day was a complete disappointment of grossness and failure. Feel so ripped of...