Challenge Accepted Escape Rooms — Attraction in Bolingbrook

Top notch escape room experience! My wife and I are fairly experienced with escape rooms (we've done maybe 30 spanning multiple cities), and the atmosphere here was in my top 5. We did the High Noon room, which was advertised as their hardest, and it lived up to the challenge. The puzzles themselves were not super difficult, and most were fairly intuitive, but there were a LOT of them. And a lot of hidden keys and items to discover about the room. I love rooms with a heavy exploration factor! As mentioned, the theme and atmosphere were fantastic - you feel like you've stepped into an old west saloon. All of the props and puzzles were on theme, and even the hints given were signaled with a little "Yee-haw!" alarm sound. We didn't quite finish the room (we'd brought a couple first-timers with us, and as mentioned, the room was very difficult), but we were one puzzle away, and the guy running the game was nice enough to break down the last puzzle so we could see what we would have needed to do if we'd had time. We met the two proprietors as well as the employee who ran our room, and all of them were interesting and engaging. I wish I could remember the name of the guy who ran the room - his intro was very well narrated and he seemed to be having fun with it.

I kind of hate to knock off a star, because I really did love the room, but there were two large downsides I feel compelled to comment on:

American Style booking - this means you can get strangers in your room if you don't book all of the spots. Luckily the room we did only has a 6 person max, so we were fairly confident that with 4 of us nobody else would book the same spot (and they didn't). That said, this place could really use a better private booking option (flat fee for private bookings, or better yet, just increase price per person if less than max number are booked). I have seen the odd positive review of people playing with strangers, but by and large no group of players wants others there solving the puzzles for them. Most of the rooms along the west coast have picked up the private booking style - time for the midwest to adopt it also.

Limited Number of Hints - You get 3 hints standard for this one, and a 4th if you check in on social media (which we did). I understand the rationale of limiting hint numbers (competing against other teams to get the best time), but most places have begun abandoning this practice, since most groups are only competing against themselves and don't care if they get their names on a leader board they'll never see. This is just my game design opinion, but given the single-use nature of escape rooms, it is detrimental to the fun of the game to limit hints. You actually want players to complete the room - it gives them a sense of accomplishment, and they're more likely to want to come back for other rooms. If you're worried about leader boards, tell them they have 3 hints to be eligible for a leader board position, but if they just want to get hints to try to complete the room in time, they can request as many as they want.

All that said, I still highly recommend Escape hOUR Room to anyone visiting the area! Just be aware of the booking style and take whatever precautions you...

Amazing experience, entirely unexpected! Here is what is probably the longest review I have ever written! This place deserves it :)

(Edit: This Escape Room would have a 5 star over all review if it weren't for one reviewer who gave it 2 stars for the sole fact that he and his wife were unable to escape. So take that review with a grain of salt!)

Let me start off by saying that me and my girlfriend went into this experience not expecting much. We had never attempted an escape room, and figured we wanted to try something new. In today's world, especially in Illinois-- There isn't much to do besides go to bars and drink LOL! So we decided to take the chance and fork up (the totally 100% reasonable) $65.

We're on a budget, so we almost turned around last second. We figured maybe we could spend that $65 on something else more tangible... but agreed together that you can't put a price on a great experience. So we flipped a coin with heads being "Let's do the Escape Room" and tails being "let's spend the money elsewhere"-- The Coin landed on tails--- Lol, So we did the escape room anyways!!

This turned out to be a great decision.

When we arrived, the Game master was super friendly and EXTREMELY good at explaining the tips for success and the rules. He also added a ton to the experience by joking around with us and just being an over all friendly person.

We chose the holiday room because we were on a time crunch. This was a great starting point for new "Escapees"...the riddles within the room were challenging and very interactive (i.e., Solve a puzzle and a key falls from seemingly out of no where!)...

What we liked most about the experience was that it forced us to work together ❤️... This was a welcoming experience for us as we both work hard and long hours, and very rarely get time to work together on anything. The experience reminded us how thankful we are to be in a relationship with each other, as well as reminded us how much we can accomplish together. I am only saying this because I want anyone reading this to understand that an escape room isn't only about being a great problem solver, but also about team work and cooperation.

I'd venture to say that this Escape Room experience would be perfect for any family who wants a chance to bond, or even company retreats to teach the importance of teamwork! Our Game Master made this side of the experience so much more powerful due to his ability to convey the importance of team work, as well as at the very end- explaining where we went right and where we went wrong. Which believe it or not, was very important to my and my Girlfriend due to the lessons it taught us.

In the end, we had one piece of the puzzle left before time ran out. My girlfriend had the right idea, and I panicked and caused us to miss by just a few seconds LOL oops!

All in all, this was an absolutely unexpectedly AWESOME experience and we...

This review is for specifically the "High Noon" room.

My wife and I are reasonably experienced escape room addicts (having done and escaped from over 20+ rooms, many of which were done as a duo). This particular room we just attempted, and after failing to complete it, I feel compelled to say that it is honestly a poorly designed room. Aesthetically, it was good, but the sheer number of puzzles to solve were absolutely ridiculous. Between the number of objects to find, keys to find, and number combinations, and puzzles to solve, we completed at least 25 different "tasks" in the room, and we didn't even come close to finishing. In our experience, most escape rooms have around 15-25 tasks TOTAL to solve to complete the room, this one was probably in the 30+ range. At least 3 different puzzles were mechanically broken to the point that the game master had to enter the room to give us the object and/or information that we would have gotten. The Morse code puzzle was very touchy, didn't like how long I held the dashes for (resulting in a ton of failed attempts due to the wrong resultant letter), and took way too much time to input, making experimenting with it a massive waste of time. In the end, we were shown how much of the room was left to solve, and my jaw hit the floor (to avoid spoilers, I'll simply say we didn't even come close). I'll say this flat out: There is NO way to complete this room in 1 hour. I have my doubts that the room could be completed in under 45min even with unlimited hints.

But perhaps the most frustrating part of my experience was the attitude of our game master. His touting of the room being "hard" or "I've only seen one group actually complete the room" was extremely frustrating and honestly made me even more upset that we failed. For starters, that escape rate is ridiculously low, and should tell you that there is something wrong with the room design. Additional comments from our game master saying "you guys were really close", and then revealing how much of the room was remained to be solved left me frustrated to the point that I lost my cool and started cussing (sorry about that). My frustrations about the broken puzzles were met with nonchalance, and a comment about how he "stopped the timer when he was in the room with us", but dismissed the fact that we lost a ton of time fiddling with the broken puzzles. The few seconds the timer was stopped when he was in the room did not make up for this lost time.

All in all, don't bother with this room unless you like broken puzzles and far too many to be reasonably done in the...