EscapeX Rooms - Irvine Escape Room — Attraction in Irvine

I've done over 125 escape rooms in Seattle, LA, New Orleans, Houston, and the Bay Area. I actively travel and seek out the best escape rooms in the US, so this review is catered specifically to enthusiasts looking for unique, high quality rooms.

Curse of the Black Knight - high 3/5 | Rank 63/145 (A decent room with unique elements, but was a bit off from distinguishing itself compared to standard escape rooms.)

Curse of the Black Knight is primarily an adventure game. You go into the castle, do a bunch of adventurey things in a pretty cool interactive set and some amount of story (though not terribly compelling). This is a reasonable 30 minutes while it lasts, but felt a bit shallow - it would have been nice if there was just more content, whether that be more interesting puzzles or better story/scripted events - as is it felt like a decent, but slightly shallow experience overall.

Set - The interactive set is the main focus of the room, and it’s good. They packed a lot of varied set in a relatively small space, and it’s a pretty good implementation of a castle set with multiple floors/levels. For some reason though, it didn’t appeal to me as much as it should it have - maybe it’s just castle themed room fatigue since i’ve done a ton of them at this point, but a large part of the castle didn’t feel as immersive as it could have been, perhaps because there wasn’t as much story involvement with a good chunk of it.

Story - You have to lift the curse of the black knight, and the room takes you along the journey to do that. The puzzles do connect with the story and there is maybe one or two memorable story events.

Puzzles - The puzzles were mostly physical of the type “put X object in Y location” though there were some logic based puzzles as well. These were generally fun, but there was only one physical challenge that really stood out as unique (it was a simple but pretty cool set piece). None were particularly challenging, so don’t expect a ton here.

Player Recommendations - While the set is big, the game is very linear and there’s not a ton to do for larger groups. You should probably bring 2-4 people tops depending on if you’re an enthusiast or newbie.

Personal Stats: Escaped in a group of 3...

We had a horrible experience at this escape room facility. We were unfortunately completely misled to believe that this would be an appropriate venue for our daughters birthday party. She has done several escape rooms with friends and they were fun and enjoyable because their difficulty was age appropriate and they would get help when needed. We were completely misled to believe that this was a good location for our daughter and her friends. The place is dark, smells, is in incredibly hot inside and the person, Dorian, that was assigned to help us had no experience in dealing with a young group of girls. This was a complete nightmare and ruined our daughters birthday. The game was far too difficult for their age, the room was dark and hot, multiple items didn't work which made it even more complicated, it was truly infuriating that we were mislead to think this was a good place for her party. I reached out to the owners a couple of times and they never responded so just goes to show they don't care about their business or customers. Avoid this place at all costs, it's a dump and our particular person that assisted us was...

I hate to give such an awesome room a bad review, but I really do think that having a good friendly game master/staff really adds to the experience. Yes it’s a great escape room, the puzzles flowed well, they all made sense. It was an exciting room with fun surprises and the props and atmosphere were unreal. But the game master 100% took away from all of that. He wasn’t friendly, which really ruins any experience. We told him several times during the game we couldn’t hear anything he was saying because the speakers were making a cracking noise, he didn’t acknowledge us once. Even after the game when we explained we couldn’t hear him all we got was a “I’ll look into it”. lol I’ve done escape rooms that were lacking in puzzles, theme, atmosphere, props, but at least the game master was friendly and I walked away with a better experience because of that. As much as I’d love to come back here I solely wouldn’t based on the game master alone, I think his name was Dorian so yeah thanks Dorian for being such a...