Casa Loma Escape Rooms — Attraction in Toronto

We were a group of 9 and paired with 9 others. We did the Bootleggers room.

The good:

Rooms and actors were well done and immersive. The puzzles were interesting and had a unique feel to them. Only for one part of one puzzle did I feel like "Oh I've seen this before" The first half to three quarters of the game had us split up into 4 groups. Our room had 5 parallel puzzles to solve, so this part managed the large numbers well. Each puzzle was interesting and a reasonable challenge level.

The bad:

The intro is done in a theatre, presumably common to all the rooms. After the intro you need to walk to the actual room, which is immersion breaking as you go through the lobby and the cafeteria. Once we got to the tunnels, it fit more with the story.

Being split up, you don't even get to see a large number of the puzzles. If your group finishes before other groups, you go join them which lets you see a bit more, but even the first solvers miss out on large portions, and the last group misses everything.

The puzzles we had were entirely separate from each other. There was never a "oh, we don't have enough information for this yet" moment. Still much better than a completely linear set up, but it would be nice if there was some crossover.

One of the puzzles was pretty subjective. Perhaps a personal feeling, but typically when you have the answer to a puzzle it is "obviously" correct.

The Ugly:

Designing a room for 20 people seems like a bad choice. The area for our room was big enough that it could have been 2 separate rooms for 5-10 people each. Splitting helps this, but some puzzle will be solved last, and at that point you just have a lot of people just standing around.

There were 3 puzzles that were necessarily after everything else was done, and only one even made an attempt at having multiple tasks that teams could split off of to solve. Our group happened to be the last one solved, so of the 8 puzzles I saw, half had a large number of people just standing around. One puzzle which guaranteed having everyone present also only had enough space for 3 or 4 people to actually work on.

Verdict: Good puzzles, environment, and acting. But being forced to play with a large group greatly detracted from the experience. I'd recommend going to one of the many other rooms in the city for smaller groups. Even with a large group, it's probably more fun to just do two separate rooms, as your group will be separated for the fun...

This is an escape room experience that is unparalleled to other escape rooms. Amazing actors who played a pivotal role in setting the scene, providing help, and being a part of the actual puzzle. It was well designed for large groups with the multi-room layout that split our 15-person team into 5 teams to solve 3 simultaneous puzzles, before then bringing us together to solve two more puzzles. This felt like a great way to let players get used to solving on their own, before help from the "better" puzzlers could arrive and help them solve it.

But the real treat was in the details. Every bit of the house felt like both world building and a cleverly hidden clue, with puzzles that I can genuinely say I haven't seen before! No puzzles felt too hard to handle, but they did stretch the lateral thinking, and the actors were useful in giving hints without giving answers. Then there's the MOOD of the entire night; the sound effects of a ticking clock as you hit your time limit (in our case, police sirens over the speaker getting louder as the police were coming to foil our bootlegging and robbery) makes the sense of panic and need to solve VERY REAL. The last activity felt like a scene out of Clue as we were running from room to room trying to find the last pieces needed to escape, and it was the most fun I've had in a while (not just escape rooms). In the end, we escaped with less than a minute left, and we all genuinely felt like geniuses working through the multiple layers of puzzles and story.

If you have even a passing interest in escape rooms, this is the one to do, and is even worth coming from outside the country for...

I've done at least 8 escape rooms this year and Escape Casa Loma-- at least, the escape room itself-- definitely makes my top 3.

Pros: The live actors really made the experience unique and immersive. They were all decked out in clothes fitting with the theme. They were always in character and had great, infectious energy. The escape room itself was fun and full of interesting puzzles, and no two were the same, despite there being so many. There were few to no literal locks that you had to find a combination for; everything as far as I could remember was sensor-based, which is extremely creative. I loved that there were multiple floors leading up to a tower-- but after a while we got a bit sick of the stairs. The decor was beautiful and I loved every detail.

Cons: The stairs were endless, and I really wish the website were more upfront about how many stairs you'd need to climb -- not only within the escape room itself, but also just to get there. It's also kind of unclear where to go to get to the escape room and you have to walk through a lot of employee hallways, which was very off-putting. I also think mixed group escape rooms shouldn't exist, since it ruins the experience greatly, and feels like a cash grab. Luckily, we got a nice group of people, but it was still slightly awkward and felt jarring when trying to solve puzzles in a timely manner.

Overall, a top-tier escape room with a few flaws that strongly impacted the experience, but still one of my favorites by far. I'd definitely go back to Toronto just to do another escape room here, but I'd try to get a full group if possible to avoid...