Padlock Escape Games: College Station — Attraction in College Station

This is a review of the Masquerade 'murder mystery' room as well as Padlock Escape Games itself. I have not attempted the other two rooms.

Rating: Average 2.5-3.0 Stars I found the experience, compared to experience at other venues, to be lackluster for the Masquerade 'murder mystery' room. The theme and tedious nature of the puzzles was disjoint from the interesting environment of the room. It left me wanting, but not in a good way.

Pros: -The establishment was clean and felt like a safe environment for me and my family. -The staff was well informed, well spoken, and courteous. -The price for the room was cheaper than any other escape room that I've visited. -The environment in the Masquerade room was convincing and unique.

Cons: -The Masquerade room was very linear (rather than having multiple clue arcs, we had to wait for one clue at a time to be solved before we could move on to something else.) This lead to people standing around doing nothing for long periods of time. -While I was hoping to find a CSI style mystery with forensics, hidden clues, and adventure, most of the things in the room that needed solving were not creative, but rather combination locks on purses, suit cases, cupboards, a dresser, and other random containers. The final keypad was so irrelevant to the theme that we had no idea that it was even the final puzzle. -Most of the puzzles for the combination locks were convoluted math puzzles that were more tedious than fun, and once again not related in any way to the theme of the room. Of the puzzles that were not math related, tedious is once again the descriptor (e.g. Find a page in the book, count 50 lines down, then count 25 letters over in a book printed in Font 6 Arial. Now do this 5 times to get your combination.) -At one point, a potentially dangerous hazard arose when a tiny fish hook was needed to retrieve a key in a large bottle bolted to the counter (once again, what does this have to do with the theme?) The hook was accidentally dropped into the bottle, and after 10 minutes of retrieval time by 3 different people, one person was hooked twice in the finger and the other once in the arm. Keep in mind, since the room was linear, 8 people were standing around waiting on the key to get pulled out before we...

The room was original enough, and had some pretty enjoyable puzzles in it, while other were grasping at straws. We played the secret study room the other night, and I was playing with two first timers for escape rooms while I have played nearly 20+ rooms and work at one myself. I have to say I was disappointed when at around 43:00 minutes left we asked for a hint because we were stumped, and it wasn't until nearly 36:00 remaining that we received said hint. It sounded like another group had just come inside right as we were asking, but there were still multiple people working there and they should've been able to slide the note under the door. Normally, I wouldn't care but it soured our experience after finding out we had done the last puzzle but barely had not made it out, where as we easily could have made it had us not being stuck and standing around for so long waiting for the one hint to come. The staff apologized and I understand that mistakes happen sometimes. Might come back in the future for hopefully a...

We tried the room : Kidnapped on 20th Feb (just after the snow storm in Texas). We have done around 15 escape rooms so far and this was the worst room ever. Below were the issues that we faced: There were technical problems in the room. 1 of the drawers which was supposed to be closed was open. There was some puzzle which involved using thermal energy. That was not working even when the staff tried to use it. Some puzzles were just very difficult. We had to remove a key from a maze. We spent 15 mins on it and could not do it. We asked the staff later to try it. Even they were finding it difficult to remove it.

There was no connect between where we find a clue and which lock should we open.

We have successfully solved 8.5 and 9 difficulty puzzles in Austin, but we could not have escaped this room with even 2 hrs.

We hoped to have a nice time after a terrible week in Austin without power and water. Sadly, this experience was...