Kersey Valley Escape — Attraction in Archdale

My friends and I did sanitarium with high hopes. We were driving through on I-40 towards the mountains, and went out of our way to check out this escape room. We’ve done over 30 rooms, and hearing that is was an entire house got us very excited. The puzzles were well done and fun. The rooms had good flow. We liked all the different spaces to move through. And you could tell a lot of time and money went into building it. However, we all agreed it was underwhelming and did not meet our expectations. And here’s why…without giving anything away: There are five rooms, which means you have an average of 12min to get through each room and escape within 60min. It IS possible… if they changed a few simple things.

Unlimited clues are great, and help nudge you in the right direction when you are struggling. However, the clues would move faster if the game master was paying attention. We kept joking he was watching Netflix because he kept asking us what we’ve already done to figure out what we need to do next. That wasted time.

It was VERY dark in the rooms and they only give you one black light flashlight for a group of people. Luckily, we only had four people. I couldn’t imagine having more than that and no light. Thankfully no strangers signed up, because not allowing private parties unless you pay for 10 people was a turnoff. But only having one light automatically sets you up for failure by not allowing anyone else to see, while tripping over “dead bodies”. You can’t solve the puzzles without seeing! And they won’t let you use your phones. Later the game master said that people keep breaking the black lights, but they can buy a supply of cheap flashlights at the dollar store or on Amazon so players can see what they are doing.

Also, there is no board to write on. There’s a ton of numbers to remember on the fly, and we constantly had to run back and forth because we forgot the numbers. That wasted a ton of time. And again, you can’t use your phone.

Finally, we made it to the last puzzle which takes a significant amount of time to solve (but would take much less if we could write down our findings), and there is no clock to show us how much time we have. So the music speeds up, and then they say it’s over and the game master walks in. They should have given us a couple more minutes which is all we needed.

Therefore in conclusion, it was fun. But by changing a few things, it could be so much better and a memorable experience as opposed to blah and not worth the money.

1. give players a white board & markers
2. give each player a cheap flashlight or hide them around so we can each have one
3. make all your rooms private with a minimum of three or four
4. put a clock in the last room if not every room
5. make sure the game master pays attention

Do all that, and it’s a strong five...

I do not recommend doing escape rooms at this place as the staff was offensively rude and the game was poorly designed, but they do have good props.

As a veteran player of escape rooms I have seen many different good and bad escape experiences and this experience was the 2nd worst game I have ever played. After 1 hour we solved 2 puzzles and both were because we asked for clues and the staff gave us the answers. While I understand that some people may grasp the puzzles in the room quickly, our team did not. Unlike other escape games there are no clues in the room and the game masters do not give you clues, only answers, which is no fun at all. This is the only game I have played when you were not allowed to write anything down. Staff response was "we will put it on the monitor if you need to remember something." The staff was rude before and after the room and they were not attentive or helpful during the game. It was over 30 minutes into trying to solve the first puzzle before they put the code we had to memorize on the monitor and we had less than 2 minutes left before they put the code to the second puzzles on the monitor so we could put it correctly into the lock. After the game when we asked them to explain the puzzles the staff was rude and insisted the room had a 99% success rate so if we did not understand something it was because we were not smart enough to understand it.

The props and mechanics in the room that we saw were very good but the staff and clue economy were the worst I have experienced making it all around the 2nd worst room I have done out of nearly 50 in...

Honestly considered leaving one star, but do not think the entire business should be graded by one poor experience.

We were invited by friends to join them for the "Impulsion" escape room. We were underwhelmed by the experience. Here are the key take aways:

-- It was rated for up to 10 people, but we found our party of 7 to be too many. Room could possibly be better with 2-4.

-- Member of our party was injured by an exposed nail.

-- The game master provided hints without us asking and continued to do so after we asked for them to stop.

-- There is not a restroom in the same areas as the escape room. There is one on the property, so if you need to go before the escape room starts ask early so they can make that pit stop for you.

There were also some other notable issues that I will list below. The items below do not give away answers to any of the puzzles, but I want to be respectful of other gamers who prefer to enter the room with no context.

• SPOILERS * Room only has one puzzle to work on at a time. Duplicate lock types (i.e.: directional, alphabetic, numerical, etc). Limited flashlights provided Recurring noise that is at an uncomfortable and...