Trapped Ottawa Escape Room & Bar — Attraction in Ottawa

Relatively seasoned escape room player, 30 rooms completed with a mostly successful escape rate. This is a 100% honest review.

When our party of three arrived to Trapped Escape, we were offered to “like their socials page AND make a post or video on my personal socials about Trapped Escape Ottawa” and show proof of completion to the staff to get 10% discount off our escape room purchase and a free drink. The pressure of having to show proof of posting about Trapped Escape on social media to the staff member, leads to naturally forcing the consumer to make only positive posts (as it is awkward to show a staff member a negative review of their establishment). It very much comes across as a means to buy or artificially inflate positive reviews which is a red flag.

As for the escape room itself, my group of three did the “doll-house” escape room and there were many design flaws that made the room unreasonably longer to complete than it should have:

all the puzzles are magnetically locked, leading to a 5 to 10 second delay between properly solving a puzzle and something opening as a reward.

-we ran out of time with perhaps 7 or 8 puzzles completed. Our game master walked us through the rest of the room and we discovered we had 4 full puzzles left we hadn’t even started, all of which had to be done in linear succession and could not be done at the same time. Meaning our one hour escape room would have realistically taken us an hour and a half.

the audio for the escape room guides the game, but is very bad and hard to hear/understand what is being said when critical information is being relayed

there are several instances where you are expected to put objects onto specific shelves to solve the puzzle and activate something, with the expectation that it is intuitive when its not without any sort of clue or diagram

there’s one puzzle that involves 4 objects that rotate, with each object having to be correctly turned a specific way to solve the puzzle. The margin for a correct answer on this puzzle is so small that we had the answer for 10 mins before anything opened because it wasn’t perfect enough.

there’s a puzzle that involves turning an object vigorously for an extended period of time (like 20-25 seconds) before anything opens, which was very unintuitive.

there’s a video scene partway through the room that advances the story, but it plays out for easily 3-4 minutes and you can’t do anything to progress the room forward while it plays out, wasting your precious solve time.

Overall this escape experience was very poorly designed unfortunately, and is probably a bottom 3 escape experience for our group. I hope Trapped Escape Rooms Ottawa will reassess this particular room and make some adjustments to make the room more fair and reasonable...

HONEST Review/ HEADS UP to experienced escape room players: (did Dollhouse at Ottawa trapped escaped rooms- done other trapped rooms in Mississauga.) (We are all well educated adults in our late 20’s- early 30’s and Succeded greatly across various other locations.)

Firstly know that most positive reviews may be as a result of establishment buying reviews in exchange for free drink- was asked to show the staff when finished, which we didn’t do, but based on how poorly designed our room was compared to all others we have done, my group doesn’t believe that there are almost no honest reviews under 4 stars.

Note: all puzzles automatic opening with high tech, no codes or manual locks.

Problems as follows: high tech not always best, as tech made opening some boxes finicky unless very specific micro adjustment made to orientation of several items that should be trivial, and has nothing to do with your group solving the clues.

-room was too long - too many puzzles, plus surprise “final puzzle” following with a lengthy audio clip that is hard to hear and waste what should be your final Precious minutes to escape.

-we did not escape , but agreed to see the rest of the room. MASSIVE jumps in logic puzzles that we had not yet encountered. Where well designed escape rooms follow “recipes” in terms of structure and logical assumptions, this was honestly all over the place, expected things of players that they “should know” which would not be obvious even with careful consideration of all provided materials and clues . Our group believes this was all result of poor design and attention to what is provided to players.

Overall we won’t be back, because these problems cause frustration when you are bribed for likes/shares/comments, and then your room isn’t even well designed. We have paid up to 45$ American (when travelling) per player and are happy to pay for quality, this is just not it. We hope the establishment sees this and considers evaluating / adjusting the logic of their rooms and electronics. And for other people who love escape rooms, just be aware what you are...

One heck of an experience...

We were a group of 7 who tackled the new REM room at Trapped Ottawa, and honestly, it was more frustrating than fun. The theme was cool — props to whoever designed the atmosphere — but that’s pretty much where the positives end.

The puzzles felt like they were built solely to burn time rather than offer any kind of satisfying challenge. Repetitive doesn’t even begin to describe it — we must’ve done the same type of puzzle over and over again, with maybe two that were even slightly different. It got VERY OLD VERY fast.

On top of that, the room was completely linear, which made things worse with a bigger group. Instead of splitting up and solving things in parallel (which keeps everyone engaged), we were forced to wait around while 3 or 4 people worked through a sequence at a time. The rest of us were just… standing there. Not fun.

They take your phones away at the start, which I’m fine with — but they also don’t give you flashlights or notepads, even though the room is dimly lit and filled with sequences that require memory or trial-and-error. Trying to solve those puzzles without being able to take notes or see properly was a nightmare — especially with seven people all trying to crowd around one small thing.

In short: nicely themed, but incredibly tedious, repetitive, and poorly designed for group play. We left more annoyed than...