Big Escape Rooms — Attraction in Birmingham

Update: we were told we would get a refund within 16 business days and never received a refund. Haven’t gotten any email or calls back from the place. Unacceptable. What a waste of money. READ THE ONE STAR REVIEWS BEFORE BOOKING THIS JOKE OF A PLACE!!! By the looks of it, they sure do owe a lot of people a lot of money back from scamming so many customers. You’ll save yourself alot of trouble, time, and money! I don’t know how this place has so many good reviews giving praise. Don’t be another person that they take advantage of.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME AND MONEY!!! I would not recommend this place. If I could give it 0 stars, I would. My dad and I wanted to do an escape room in Birmingham so we chose to book the Clown room here for 12:30 pm. The Google hours showed the business to be open from 09:00-00:00 so we showed up 20 minutes early (at 12:10) to check in. I called the facility to let them know we were there due to the door being locked and no one answering when we ran the door bell. I spoke to Greg and he said that the game manager was on his way, to give him 5 minutes and he would be there. I called again after 15 minutes and the game manager was still not there, I was told to wait 2 more minutes as the game manager was on his way. At 12:30, the game manager was STILL not there. I called Greg again and expressed my concerns as our game was supposed to start at 12:30 and we still had not been met by anyone to let us inside. I was told this time that the game manager had tried to contact me at the number they had on file for my reservation. However, the number that was on the reservation, was not the number that they supposedly were trying to contact after reading it to me. Greg stated to give him a couple more minutes to have the game manager contact me. After 11 more minutes, I called for the 4th time to express that our game was supposed to start at 12:30, no one had come to let us in or even showed up to the building, and that I wanted a refund to the card used because we were done waiting around. Greg told me to give him 2 minutes and he would call me back. 8 minutes later (it’s 12:50 pm at this point), Greg called and stated that the game manager that was supposed to be at the facility already and supposedly had been in his way the entire time we were waiting, was not even going to be at the facility until 3:30 pm and asked if we wanted to reschedule. We declined because we are not from Birmingham and we had already been waiting 40 minutes for someone (from 12:10-12:50) with no show of anybody that worked here. After telling him that we wanted a refund, we were informed that the refund would take 16 business days and that we had to reply to an email stating that the game manager did not show up after talking to Greg 5 times on the phone. I would not recommend this business to anyone nor would I ever consider choosing to try this business again. Very unprofessional. You should not be allowed to offer games if 1. you can’t staff your business when people book rooms and spend their money to play, 2. have someone there during business hours from open to close regardless if rooms are booked or not, and 3. be reliable and truthful from the beginning. This experience was ridiculous and a waste of time when this is what we came to Birmingham to do. We will be contacting the better business bureau. The email they provide for you to contact doesn’t even work or allow you to send emails to it. What a damn scam this place is. Absolutely...

To start, I did the clown room and the design and puzzles were fun. I liked the idea behind the rooms and it was an interesting concept with clever puzzles. The problems that me and my party had were mostly due to the guide. When we got stuck we asked for a hint. It took the guide a few minutes to answer and put a hint on the screen. I understand that the hints are usually clever and are not just telling you what to do, but we got a hint that directed us back into the first room. After struggling to figure out what the hint meant for about 5 minutes, we called the guide and asked for clarification. After a minute the guide helped us a little more. The problem is…. she gave us a hint to a puzzle that we had already solved. So not only did we spend minutes figuring out what the hint meant, we spent another 10 minutes trying to figure out another code from something that was already used. THIS HAPPENED TWICE. WE WERE GIVEN TWO HINTS THAT MADE US BACKTRACK IN THE PUZZLE. The guide did not know anything about the room that we were doing and when we asked again in frustration what she meant by the clue (because we realized it was useless) she told us that the numbers were “scrambled” and to guess every combination of numbers that we saw. (There were 12 numbers and it was a 4 digit code, so hundreds of possible combinations). After we begged her for more help she told us to try a specific code that she got from her notes. It didn’t work. A few minutes later she entered the room and messed with the lock for a minute before opening it and telling us to continue. We are annoyed but continue. A little bit later we are confused again and ask for a hint. She gives us a hint after a few minutes (because the walky talkies are awful for communicating with the guide). The hint she gave us was to the lock that she had just opened and let us struggle until we eventually ran out of time.

So basically our guide gave us two hints that wasted our time because we had already completed those puzzles, and then opened a lock and then proceeded to give us clues to the lock that she opened instead of the one that was still locked. The escape room itself was fun but it was incredibly frustrating when the guide wastes half of your time because they are 1) not knowing the puzzles or 2) not paying attention. She didn’t even give us time back after wasting so much of our time. She even asked us multiple times which lock we were stuck on and still gave us the wrong hints for them. We each spent $40 on this escape room hoping that it would be a fun experience, but it honestly left us more frustrated than happy. I believe if we had another staff it would have been a more enjoyable experience. She apologized after we told her how much she messed up our experience but did not do anything about it and it honestly left us more frustrated. I wish we could have gotten a refund or something because of how frustrating this...

What a complete waste of time and money. We’ve done well over 50 escape rooms and this one was definitely bottom 5. We showed up 15 minutes early and sat in the waiting room almost 40 minutes…everyone was sweating as they had the temp set on 76. We did the pharaoh room and were given walkie talkies to communicate with the person monitoring our room so that we could ask questions when we got stuck. The channel we were told to use (and marked on the walkie talkie…we double checked) was apparently used by other rooms or the staff because we could hear people talking and laughing the entire time we were in the room. You try to go to an “immersive experience” and this obviously completely ruins that. We also had a member of the staff come into our room several times…the first time to ask if she had left her walkie talkie in the room and to peruse the room to see if she could find it. Again, completely ruining our focus. Beyond that the puzzles are laid out in a weird way so you can spend 15 - 20 minutes trying to solve something that is impossible to solve as you get all your clues in a subsequent room. The previous escape rooms we’ve been to where this has been the case in other escape rooms, the game master either tells you before you start or after you spend a good amount of time on a specific puzzle…they lightly nudge you and say “move on, you can’t solve this now.” Seemingly a small point, but if you’re completely focused on trying to solve something and can’t…again, ruins the experience. We’ve only been to a couple (out of dozens) that are this poorly laid out from a structure perspective. Similarly we correctly figured out the pattern for a directional lock, but it wouldn’t open so we tried to solve it several different ways (very time consuming) and when we finally called in for a clue, she said “oh just pull it really hard, a bunch of people having been having problems with that one”…ok fix it. We finally progressed to a tomb room (the only cool part of the escape room was this room, which was nicely decorated). The icing on the cake for us came once we got into this room…we ended up just walking out of the room before our time was up. It’s very dimly lit and they have a very small black cup of water inches from an electrical part of the game…how is it reasonable for someone to see water in that scenario? It’s quite normal to expect someone to tilt the cup to see what’s in it and even if you leave it where they staged it and just slightly tilt it…it goes straight onto some electrical monitoring system that you can’t see (it’s hidden). The game master then came in acting like my 60 year old mother was a complete idiot for spilling the water. Dont waste your time or money…Breakout games in town is...