Trapped Escape Rooms & Lounge Toronto — Attraction in Toronto

We did the carnival escape room and it was well done, but I do have a few simple suggestions to get to a 5-star escape experience:

1. carnival is listed as an adventure themed escape room, but I believe it would be more appropriate to list it as a horror escape room. I was intentionally trying to avoid a horror theme for my parents first escape experience so we were surprised by what we saw when we entered the room.

2. the flow of the room is thrown off by giving players too many puzzles and too many puzzle pieces at once. For example, without trying to spoil anything, after you unlock the second door in the room you unlock 2 new puzzles but there are no intuitive clues/hints within the room to indicate which puzzle should be solved first and which puzzle pieces correspond to which puzzle. This impedes the pacing of the room in a way that is disengaging to players, I think a quick fix would be adding either a riddle/clue/hint to the room so players can solve the order they need to complete puzzles without having to call in for a hint; alternatively I think a more modern solution I see within other escape rooms is keeping puzzle pieces/puzzles locked away from players until the time they are relevant to the escape. *As a disclaimer the first rooms design is well done despite having multiple puzzles/pieces because all puzzles culminated in solving one larger puzzle, and it is clear which pieces correspond to which puzzles, it would be great to see this throughout the experience :)

3. Red herrings: this is a personal gripe of mine so take it with a grain of salt. When escape rooms give you items that seem like clues but are never actually used in the solving of any puzzles it can feel a bit frustrating to waste so much time on something that progresses you nowhere, especially since escape rooms are timed experiences. To be fair, I think this room only had one or two Red herrings but I still think the experience would have been improved by just removing these unlockable items all together.

4. the lighting quality in this room I think was intentional to add to the horror ambience but it made it really difficult to read puzzle hints or see certain things in the dark (specifically text and numbers) which I don't believe is intentional. At one point my mom had to use a flashlight on her phone to read some text and we got yelled at over the walkie-talkie to not use phones in the escape room; I know this is usually SOP for escape rooms but this was her first experience and nobody mentioned flashlights were against the rules before we began the room to her.

5. the audio quality of the speakers in the room made it difficult to understand at some points, but it was manageable. The audio quality of the walkie-talkies are a little rough though, we had to page multiple times for our walkie-talkie signal to get through to the game masters for a hint and when it did the audio would be clear sometimes but choppy other times.

6. The responsiveness of puzzles is pretty good in most cases but there was a puzzle in the first room that we had solved correctly and it didn't trigger the next puzzle to open, we ended up eventually redoing our original solution after some time and the next puzzle unlocked but it can feel bad to have had the correct solution, have it fail, then waste time looking for an alternative solution that won't work. There was another puzzle in the third room (second last puzzle you complete in the experience) where you have to press down pretty firmly on something for it to trigger the last step of that puzzle; one of our team members initially didn't press it hard enough so we just thought this wasn't the right solution to the puzzle for a few minutes.

Overall we still had an amazing time solving this room and we still managed to make it out on time. I'm looking forward to revisiting other rooms here when I get the chance and hopefully up my rating. I will say, in this area there is a lot of options for escape room venues but this is probably tied for my #1 spot (in this immediate area) with...

UPDATE: I have changed my review to 5 stars as the owner got back to me and not only refunded my birthday admission, but my friends as well.

I want to start by saying that the actual escape room experience was 5 stars as well as the staff. My friend and I did the Below the Sphinx room and found it challenging and fun.

My reason for giving 3 stars was due to the birthday policy. I specifically chose this escape room as on their website it states that you can get a free admission +/- 2 days of your birthday. When my friend reserved the room (indicating 2 players) she added a note asking about the birthday policy. She received an email back from the company stating that I would need to bring my ID and show the staff. When we arrived they told us that to receive a free admission you had to have at least 3 players and that it was in the fine print.

I have gone back to the website and to the confirmation email and cannot find this fine print other than that location specific restrictions may apply. This combined with the fact that the location emailed back from the confirmation booking (showing a 2 player booking) saying to bring my ID doesn’t sit right with me. I understand that policies are in place, but at least make them easy to find and understand for...

We did the Midnight Arcade room today and it was good! It was a fun theme, and the puzzles are very hands on and not lock and keys which I appreciate! Feels much more immersive that way. The room was well designed and was fun! We finished it without any hiccups and with time to spare, but we were told that this is the easiest of their 4 rooms, so I'm excited to come back and try the harder rooms! I also like that there's a little lounge area to hang out before or after with boardgames in case you get there early or if you just wanna hang out after the escape with your friends, looking forward to when the bar becomes available!

Edit: came back already for another room, this time we did the Carnival room... I was under the impression it wasn't scary, but it was a little bit scary.. like thriller scary, not horror scary, but it was definitely a lot of fun! This room was a little bit more challenging than the midnight arcade but I liked that all the puzzles made sense, we only had to ask for one clue and partly because we were overcomplicating things haha Overall super enjoyable experience, had tons of fun, I'd definitely recommend Trapped downtown Curtis and Quentin also were great game masters, even when I practically refused to let go of the...