Escapology Escape Rooms Fort Wayne — Attraction in Fort Wayne

Oh man, I hate giving an escape room a negative review. As a former game master myself and having played over 200 rooms, I love escape rooms and love the art of puzzles. Unfortunately, we had one of the worst escape room experiences today. We played the Mona Lisa room at 3:50. When I arrived, a couple was clearly having a payment issue and had requested a receipt. Something weird happened with the printer and it started printing out a huge receipt - which took time. We weren’t bothered and took our spot on the couches. When the couple finally got their receipt, the lady at the desk asked if we had a booking. We informed her we did. It was about 3:45 at this point. She remarked “if you guys don’t start your game by 3:50, we are going to start deducting time from your room. We are very busy and don’t have time to wait around. Scan this QR Code and do the waiver”. We jumped up, got our waivers done, and then the staff member disappeared. At 3:49, a different staff member came out with a group and asked us to move so she could take a picture. I informed her that the other staff member told us we needed to go to our room. She took us in and was significantly kinder and we got the room started. No big deal, I get it. You’re busy and you need to keep things on schedule!

The theming of the room was beautiful and we were excited. I don’t want to give away spoilers, but there are 4 puzzles on the wall that should give you 4 items. One item was completely missing (the spot on the wall was empty) and one item (a light) was broken. After about 20 minutes and 2 clues, we were finally hinted that we needed to use a “remote”. The remote was completely missing. We let the game master know and she said “well I don’t know where it is.” Yeah, we didn’t either. Instead of fixing it, she just gave us the answer. We let her know about the light not working and she said “just use a different one”. The worst part? She charged us all of our clues when we actually just didn’t have what we needed to solve the puzzles!

Having completed hundreds of escape rooms (and every other room at this location), I do feel there are some puzzles that need cleaned up. A clue towards the windows, the knocking actually working (took us about 10 tries), and a hint to hold the green button would have been very helpful.

At the end of the game, a new games master (a guy this time) came in. He let us know that he just got there. He was really friendly. We told him about the remote and other issues, but since he just arrived he didn’t know what to say. We got our picture and left.

I think if it was one issue: Rudeness about us being “late” and trying to get us to move quickly, broken game pieces and a missing remote, charging us clues for things that were wrong, or poorly clued mechanisms - if just one, this would be a 3/4 star review. Unfortunately we experienced them all.

My group was really disappointed in...

Game master didn’t do their job after they left the room. Said she’d be watching through the cameras and wouldn’t let us struggle too long on a clue, they’d help out. If we felt stuck, the game allowed for 3 hints to be requested. Hit button after struggling with all possible things to decode. Game master had to ask a question she shouldn’t have had to ask had they been watching. Weren’t they watching us? We said yes and it led us to how to solve a puzzle. Letters were missing from the words, but we deciphered code. However, item didn’t work after trying it numerous times. Multiple players attempted and it was checked 5-7 times. This wasted a lot of time. Game master had promised not to let us struggle and they allowed for this. We hit the hint button again and again they asked about thing we need help solving 20 minutes prior. Not watching again? We answered, but she still displayed the same hint we were given before. We had to say many times and explain we’d already solved that. She learned finally we had the right code for next step, item just wasn’t working. A different lady (not the gamemaster) came in and resolved issue. We ran out of time before 3rd room. Pieces also had to be put on a certain way, all except for last one. That one went opposite of all others. Afterwards, a third worker told us there was no way for us to have known that other than just flipping the last one. I feel like for how expensive this was, two adults and two ten year olds on kids mode should’ve been helped more. They did not watch us and that resulted in wasted time. They also allowed for a lot of wasted time while on the correct path. This was a Christmas present for my daughter. She’d done the cowboy one before and loved it. Said the game master helped them out a lot more and it was more fun and interactive for her. Both kids had no fun because they couldn’t figure anything out. Too hard for them to interact. The third lady that came in didn’t care at all about the beginning directions from the game master not having been followed through on. I’m not for participation trophies or walking someone through something, but for $280, family should’ve been able to have fun and not workers collecting paychecks in back rooms not doing their jobs. Very...

I rarely leave reviews but I am appalled that my group was allowed to pay for a room where the puzzle pieces were broken. For background, this was my first time going to an escape room. Without going into too much detail to reveal the answer for our puzzle, we were tasked with plugging standard Cat6 ethernet cables into a network switch. One of the cables was broken and had no RJ-45 heads on either end of the cable. This cable was REQUIRED to finish the puzzle. To compensate for this, 2 CLEAR RJ-45 HEADS WERE RANDOMLY PLACED IN THE ROOM. My group was full of larger men, and as a result we bumped the two tables that the CLEAR RJ-45 HEADS were resting on. As a result, we had to spend 1/3 of our time struggling to find the CLEAR RJ-45 HEADS in the dim room. It's ridiculous that necessary components for the completion of the puzzle were broken. While it wasn't necessary for the cables to be plugged into the network switches fully, it is a ridiculous that my group spent 20 minutes trying to find this cable to get the answer to the puzzle we needed. Internet cables are one of the cheapest things possible to replace, so it's frightening that that is where this location draws the line on things being too expensive to replace for puzzle completion. Will not be coming back to this location if they can't be bothered to replace puzzle components and question whether or not I'll ever visit an escape room again.

EDIT: I figured this would be important to add for context. My group WAS NOT told PRIOR to starting the room that the 2 CLEAR RJ45 HEADS had been placed in the room to compensate for the broken cable, our game master told us this AFTER our time was up...