PanIQ Escape Room Atlanta — Attraction in Atlanta

This was our first time at this escape room, after having went to Mastermind and one other a few times, and I really enjoyed my time here. We went with four from our group, and the other group that was with us brought five. The rooms were only able to be booked for 8, so it was a little tight with the extra person, but we made it work.

Talking about the staff and facility rules itself, the women who were assisting us were incredibly friendly, courteous, and had a touch of humor, which I appreciate. One woman was definitely more knowledgeable about the room setup, which was helpful when the other didn't give us all of the information, especially about the kiosk (the place you go for hints). Speaking of hints, this place does allow for unlimited hints, which turned out to be nice, due to some things I'll mention below.

Please note: the room we went into was the "Medieval Madness" so please note everything below this is in reference to that and should not be reflective of their other rooms available. YMMV depending on which room you choose.

As far as aesthetic goes, the facility did a great job nailing a very good vibe when you entered the room. Immersion was definitely on point, and they spent a lot of time designing the look of the room so you felt like you were in a totally different building. The immersion was broken a bit due to some troubles we had with some of the puzzles not working as intended (we had someone leave to get staff to assist), but overall, very well designed and laid out. The thing that hurt though is that there were only two rooms to navigate through. We spent the majority of our time in the first room, partly because we were figuring out how to work together with the other group that was with us, and partly because of the puzzles. More on that below.

As I've been going to these escape rooms rather recently, it took me a while to figure out that puzzles are designed to be difficult to figure out and obtuse, but I do feel like they were even more obtuse at PanIQ. Almost to the point of where we weren't quite sure how you'd ever figure out certain puzzles without a hint. I have come to understand that the clues that are left around a room are typically meant to really get you thinking outside of the box, but for a few puzzles in particular, there wasn't even a nudge to say what you should or should not be doing, which made us rely on hints to push our way through. Maybe that's why they give unlimited hints?

As for hints, and this is more of a personal gripe, but the group we were paired with also was very quick to grab hints, which took the fun out of it for me. I like to exhaust all options before I rely on a hint, and need to be truly stuck, so maybe having a system in place where hints are sent to phones instead of publicly visible would be a better option. This doesn't have much bearing on PanIQ, but more on the group we were with.

The puzzles did have a pretty streamlined connection with "once you've done A, you can get to B" but figuring out B just on the piece alone was nearly impossible. I would have liked to see something that hints towards what we should be doing, out of context, somewhere else in the room. That way, alone, it makes no sense, but when you DO figure it out, you at least know how to approach the puzzles. I'm being intentionally vague here so as not to spoil anything for the room, but I'm happy to elaborate more in person for those who design/set up the rooms.

Also, and I feel like this cannot be stated enough, I love the stickers that showed what was in play vs what was props. It was incredibly helpful.

Overall though, I still give the place four stars because I did have a lot of fun, I thought that even though the puzzles were hard to start, they were fun to figure out once we did get moving on them, and the hint system wasn't bad (it was just a folly of having a group who didn't want to take the time to really figure things out with us, which is no fault of PanIQ or its...

I sent this feedback to Paniq via email the same day and received absolutely no response.

My wife and I booked and completed two escape rooms here on 10/14/24, wizards challenge at 530pm and medieval madness at 7pm. The individual working there was incredible, even though she was stretched very thin trying to run 3 escape rooms at one time on her own. You could tell it was all she could do to keep them all running on a holiday. When we had to ask for a hint (usually because the puzzle wasn't working) it would take 3-5 minutes to get a hint because she was managing so many rooms at once.

While we completed both rooms, our experience with both rooms were unfortunately underwhelming. The technology used is impressive, but it fails to be as impressive as it could be when multiple puzzles do not work as intended. In wizards challenge, we had three puzzles that did not work and had to be manually triggered by the staff: the chest with the three wood rods, the shelf where we had to put all the items, and the puzzle in the first room where you have to touch the symbols shown in the mirror. In medieval madness, the heads with the chain did not work, and my wife and I spent almost 10 minutes trying to figure out why the door wouldn't open even though we absolutely had the order correct. With the 5 crosses, there was no indication that we had to put them with the gold side out, and furthermore, three of the five crosses had hardly any gold showing to differentiate the sides. We had the correct order repeatedly, but wasted a significant amount of time before we asked for a hint, just to find out they were facing backwards. This feels like an unfortunate design decision. Additionally, the stained glass panels were nearly impossible to get out of the spot they were in, as the magnets were entirely too strong and not enough room to gain purchase with fingertips.

The most disheartening part when puzzles don't work is that the player begins to doubt whether their solution is correct or not or whether it is a malfunction for the remainder of the puzzles. The staff even mentioned there are puzzles in each room that she regularly has to trigger manually, such as the mirror puzzle in the wizards challenge. This frustrated my wife and I, as we are seasoned escape room players and have done...

The worst escape room ever. We are a family who loves to go to escape rooms. Avoid this place. Our appointment was at 11:00, and we received a message that we have to arrive 15 minutes earlier. Everything stayed bad. It was closed at that time, a young lady came to the door and told us that they open until 11, and closed the door. So at 11:00 she unlock the door and told us that she needed to finish to set up the room. Ok, we waited. When we started the game, we found the 1st clue (magnet) to open the main door to move to the next area. We tried to use the magnet to unlock the next door, but it didn’t work, so we asked for help thru the camera where supposedly we will ask for clues… 5 minutes we were trying and at the same time waiting for her response. She never responded so I left the game to find her, she was having breakfast. Finally she needed to unlock it because the system didn’t work. We continue with the game, another issue happened, this time she came immediately. She needed to make a phone call, I think was the owner, and he said to shut down the computer and restart it. By the way, she tried to stop the clock, but she couldn’t. We were at the end of the game, we were solving everything. The last clue we found AGAIN didn’t work. She gave us 5 extra minutes. The game ended and she said that the clue they gave at the end WAS wrong and they changed for another BUT THEY never updated in the game. WHAT??? So we asked her what is the correct clue, her response was “I CANNOT TELL YOU”… because you didn’t finish the game.

Everything is old, in bad shape and dirty.

I try to always write positive reviews, but always be honest.

There is no way that this place can have stars.

Whoever was in the phone with this lady, knows how many problems we had.

This place is Waste of money and time. Pay $8+ dollars and go to some other place.

We were...