Captured LV Escape Room (Main St. Bethlehem) — Attraction in Bethlehem

Escape room enthusiast here. Have done around 30 rooms at roughly 20 different venues now.

Have done only one Captured LV room thus far so can't speak to the other rooms. I did "The Alchemy Lab" room. The name is misleading as it's not really alchemy themed, more serial killer surgeon/science teacher.

The good: Room is well decorated and has a coherent theme. Some unique puzzles present. Loved the random black-light art, they were obviously not part of the clues so just kinda fun and didn't feel like a red herring. Ongoing meta-puzzle to clear the room was kind of cool, helped you track your progress.

The bad: The blindfold start was kinda pointless. The handcuff start was kinda pointless as it doesn't limit mobility at all considering you're not handcuffed to anything that is cumbersome. This should have been called "The Realtor Room" instead of "The Alchemy Room" since 80% of the locks were to open a realtor key-box in order to get a key to unlock a drawer to get your next realtor key-box. As such everything was a number lock or a key lock with two exceptions that I can think of. We were able to skip over certain locks by deciding to brute force the last number once we found the first 3. No big reveal/climax/"ah-ha" moments.

Overall: Average or above average room from my experiences, fairly good 1st generation escape room. Decently well designed but lame/repetitive puzzle mechanics. If all the rooms at Captured LV are of similar quality I'd say they're probably worth hitting up if the location is convenient, but not a escape room I'd want to travel to as a...

This was a new experience for my family. We were aged 50-68 (so older than the typical group doing this) and all of us really enjoyed ourselves even though we were complete newbies. (If you're a newbie considering this hobby, they don't do muxed groups, so as long as you have 2 people, you will reserve the room and not have to share with strangers. 5 people is the limit, and seems right for the size of the room.) We did the Pirate escape and managed to avoid walking the plank by the skin of our teeth! You are allowed to use your phone flash lights as part of the room is a bit dim to create the mood, but if you do struggle to read in dim light, a larger flash light or head lamp may come in handy. The clues and treasure maps were fun to figure out and it helped to have a party of 5 with different ways of thinking. Overall the right amount of challenge, without being too obscure to figure out, nor lame obvious clues. We felt proud of ourselves for figuring it out together. Staff were friendly and helpful. We had a lot of fun and plan...

Have done all 4 at the venue as of this writing. Overall, I've done well over 20 escape rooms around the US.

This is a standard escape room experience. Puzzles are more numerous than challenging in general. Lots of matching and counting with pretty direct clues. Set design is overall solid, but sometimes you can figure out the puzzle just based on the props (i.e., you have to select a sunset of items but only some have magnets). Essentially designed around locks. Only a few interesting mechanisms. sometimes it's not clear which lock a solved puzzle goes to, which I don't like

I would not recommend going too far above the minimum. My partner and I completed all of the rooms successfully. We only had 2 people except for the Mayan temple (you can book with only 2 people if the room is still open 30 min before it's supposed to start).

We enjoyed the Casino room the most. Haunted theatre we felt had the least challenging puzzles. Mayan and Pirate ones were solid.

For a more elevated experience, check out...