Alcatraz Escape Games — Attraction in Draper

Update 10/29/2021 - Alcatraz management responded to my initial review and offered to set our party up with another escape room experience. This time around we were able to participate in the "Chloe" room. We had the room to ourselves, which was one of our larger complaints about the prior experience. The room/experience itself was quite impressive, and had an immersive atmosphere on par with some of the best haunted houses I've visited, with multiple rooms to navigate through. The puzzles were original, fit the theme of the room, and challenging but comprehensible. A live actor was part of this room who did a fantastic job and provided our party with some applause worthy jump scares. Both at the beginning and end of the experience, our host was very friendly, receptive to suggestions (which I didn’t have many as it was a very well designed room), took a group photo for us, and even introduced us to the actor we had in the room. This was the experience I had hoped for and more when we had originally booked with Alcatraz. Thank you to the management and staff of Alcatraz for not only providing our group with a second experience, but for making it one of the best escape rooms I’ve participated in yet. Because of this, I can now change my original review and can recommend Alcatraz and specifically the “Chloe” room to anyone looking for a well thought out and original escape room experience.

9/17/2021 - We were booked with another group without warning or notice. Our party of 6 reserved the "Extinct" room, but upon arrival at the facility we were surprised and disappointed to learn that another party of 4 was going to be joining our room. There was no indication that we would be sharing a room when we booked online, and this information certainly would've changed our decision to purchase tickets. The room itself delivered lackluster and non-intuitive puzzles, which were overshadowed by attempting to navigate around and talk over the 2nd party in the room with us. The whole experience was anticlimactic with many of the puzzles containing clues which could have been much better with slight adjustments. At the conclusion of the room, when asked by the host about the experience. We attempted to make suggestions as to how the puzzles of the room could be improved, but our suggestions were shut down with a "this is the way it is" attitude. I felt the host was more concerned about defending the build of the room than having a quality guest experience. A bit of good customer service to even entertain listening to suggestions would've gone a long way to better the overall experience. Overall, between being booked unknowingly with a separate group and the poor customer service we received I cannot recommend Alcatraz...

Great experience!! I had called today to see about doing the Chloe room with my husband and little brother. My husband has bad anxiety that’s triggered by people popping up by him and making loud sounds so I asked if we could be accommodated to not have the actor, and they obliged. I have done Chloe previously (didn’t get very far at all...) and didn’t expect to today either.

My brother ended up not coming so it was just us two. The staff member that helped us, Bentli, was SO nice. She chatted with us for a bit and helped calm my husband’s nerves, gave us the spiel etc. Also, as a side note...I’ve seen several reviews slamming staff for being “condescending” and treating them like “children” telling them to not break things...talk about easily offended lol. It’s not hard to nod and just listen for a minute. They HAVE to do that for liability! Maybe start looking at your self esteem issues if being asked to not break things sets you off that badly, therapy doesn’t cost much more than an escape room...anyway.

So we got into the room and I have one single issue with it. My husband is colorblind and I’m just kinda stupid so we had a VERY hard time with the piano puzzle. I’ve done it before but couldn’t remember how to do it and it ate into a huge chunk of our time. Possibly simplifying the colors or using some other sort of markers would make it more accessible for colorblind folks. Communication about the puzzle was basically impossible for us.

Another side note about negative reviews with the puzzles...I think they’re pretty intuitive and easy to solve once you understand the “language” of that room. It all seemed to go really well with the theme imo, and once we got into a groove we did pretty well. We definitely needed a few hints but it wouldn’t have been impossible without them.

The staff was super rad and went way above and beyond with hints. We asked for a couple and they would slide papers to us under the doors. We were doing pretty well I think, and got a note asking if we wanted some extra time! We were super close to finishing it so we got an extra 10 minutes and escaped! Bentli came and grabbed us and was super awesome, asked about our experience etc. She was very friendly and chatted with us about her favorite rooms, experiences working there, etc. This was my third time at Alcatraz (all good experiences!) and I’ll definitely be back. I learned that they recently got acquired by Castle of Chaos (my other favorite escape rooms) so I’ll be sure to keep supporting them.

Also as side note for you 1 star reviewers- try doing what staff asks and remembering that they’re just doing their job. A little bit of kindness goes a really...

Alcatraz is okay. With staff that isn’t overworked and has more training, it would be good.

My friends and I have done The Row, the zombie room and the bus. Each room is fine in terms of atmosphere and puzzle creativity, but we’ve consistently had trouble with the staff. Pre-room hosts have been great, but inside the zombie room the in-room host started getting clearly frustrated that we weren’t understanding a puzzle, during the last part of the room, with a zombie chasing us. The actor in Row was decent, once or twice teasing in a negative way, but played her part fairly well. The bus’s actor was atrocious, condescending, aggressive, and far less helpful than helpful. He was seated in a metal cage in the back of the bus and near constantly barraged us with demands and insults. “Sit down and count to 90 seconds for being stupid” happened to me 3 times, so I functionally got to do nothing for several minutes. “It’s clear you’re not helping” and “Do you want me to deduct time for bad behavior?” were other lovely remarks. He would slam his feet against a metal plate to punctuate statements, creating an incredibly loud sound in the metal bus. Our experience got actively better when we started ignoring his demands, which is the exact opposite relationship you want with your clue-giver and the person ostensibly there to keep you and the room safe. It felt less like all of us were prisoners together and more like we were prisoners locked in with an aggressive warden. He mellowed out some in the middle, when we talked with him about his work day. He had been working for the past 11 hours, something he said he didn’t mind, and a 13 year old had threatened to throw a lock at him earlier, which wasn’t surprising. Once we were on to the last part of the room he started resetting the first part, asking us about where we had put clue pieces, which seemed a little unnecessary since we got out with 15 minutes left. After he yelled for us to do a puzzle a certain way and slammed twice on the metal, my friend yelled back for him to please stop, and that he’s had a headache since the start of the escape. After that, the actor was close to a helpful actor for the last 7 minutes of puzzles, but it was hecka awkward.

If I have two takeaways for Alcatraz, it’s “Take care of your people so they can take care of your customers” and “Slamming on things does not...