Escape Room Downtown — Attraction in Canton

Update, St. Patrick's Day escape. Our group chose The Black Hand room, and compared to the Bootlegger's Lair, I didn't enjoy it. At all. Our team says they had a good time, so I'll be fair and leave the rating at 4 stars. It simply wasn't fun. I'm not saying that because we didn't succeed, I'm saying it because it literally felt like a chore instead of a fun time discovering clues. We never did discover the keys that would've enabled us to use the typewriter, and to say more might disclose hints which I know better than to do. Shrug. We'll wait for a new room before returning, but we will likely return to support a local business.

I should add that we'd been there earlier than my prior review, to a room that involved collecting gems which was enjoyable.

Summer 2021: I am no longer in the room, so technically, I 'escaped' :)

We nearly solved the bootlegger's lair, a few more minutes and we'd have done it. A suggestion would be to tell the room 'you have 5 minutes left' and we would've proceeded faster. Also, it was uncomfortably warm in those...

I’ve done a number of escape rooms, and Canton Criminals disappointed me. The lighting was far too low, making seeing the clues difficult. At one point, we had to pull out our phones as flashlights, which felt goofy for a staged room. Other rooms I’ve done have a linear feel to them: one clue leads to another leads to another, but this room was totally random and there was no clear path through, even after escaping. There were far too many distracter clues that had nothing to do with escape, and very few actual puzzles required. We spent more time standing around than we did solving puzzles. There were many objects whose movement was ambiguous. It was difficult to tell if pushing harder would move something or break it entirely. At one point, the gamekeeper entered the room to help with a puzzle, because it wasn’t physically possible to complete it without her. Overall, I’m disappointed, and I would rather pay more for a game set up well than get a deal on...

I've been to Escape Room Downtown several times and I highly recommend it. It's very affordable for the experience, the Canton history-based scenarios are very well designed, and the puzzles are suitably challenging.

That said, our most recent experience with the elf hunt escape room left my friends and I a bit frustrated with our experience. Our employee guide, who stayed in the room while we worked the puzzles, was very helpful when we had questions, but volunteered a lot of information when we were exploring the room, attempting to solve problems, and trying possible solutions. It felt a bit like having a team member who already knew the solution and gave very leading hints, information, or straight up answers to the puzzles. It kinda took the fun and the challenge out of it.

However, this was a one-off event, every other experience has been great, and we still had a fun time at...