Escape Room Extreme — Attraction in Largo

I am an escape room enthusiast who has done 20+ rooms in the past few years. At this location, I have tried DaVinci's office and the pirates one, and while underwhelmed I decided to give Dracula a try. My friend group and I, who can only very rarely get together, opted to book a late night room. When we got there and they put us in the room, things started off fine. We thought the room had some cool puzzles, although some clues were misspelled it wasn't anything to detract from the fun. The problem began at 37 minutes left on the clock, when my friends and I decided to ask for our first clue. The game master had warned us the intercoms were not working, so to try the phone. We picked up the phone. No one answered. We waved our arms in front of the camera. No one answered. We actually joked that we had been forgotten about. So, we continued on playing. There was a clue that we did correctly, but nothing happened. When we did it again, there was a two minute delay before the correct clue opened. From these facts we can safely conclude that the game masters were not watching the cameras, nor the phone. We ran into more delays where we wanted a clue. We decided to try the phone again. This time, someone did answer. When we asked for help, the questions they were asking about our progress indicated that they had not been watching the cameras to see where we were. We even asked, "are the cameras working?" They said yes. They then stumbled through figuring out where we were in the game, before HANGING UP THE PHONE. A few minutes later, they came over the intercom (so I guess it was working?) to give us a hint. By this point there were only 15 minutes left on the clock. We got through a few more clues before our time ran out, at which point one of the game masters came into the room while looking at her phone, reset the clock, said nothing else to us, and walked out. No apology for not watching. No walk through of what clues were left to solve. Not even a, "Bye, have a good night." Now, I'm not unreasonable. I knew that we probably messed something up along the way which gave us a stumbling block. But if the game masters had actually been watching us, or listening for the phone, they could've helped us more when we asked for clues about said stumbling blocks. Like I said, I'm an enthusiast and typically I have no problem escaping or at least getting close to escaping. The room theme was cool, but the clues were all so linear that if you hit even one that stumped you, your team was stuck and at the mercy of these unhelpful game masters. It is such a shame that the experience was ruined by inattentive customer service and, frankly, a rude interaction at the end of the game. I'm not happy that my one night a year where all of my friends are available was wasted by a few unlucky-to-have-gotten sullen and flippant "game masters." They couldn't be bothered to keep an eye on the cameras or even put their phone down to walk us out. Maybe they were having an off day, or maybe they were tired, who knows. Regardless, it was a complete waste of $150+ to have game masters who are in desperate need of more training for the role they have...

I really enjoyed this venue, I’ve played a lot of the games in the Tampa area and this one is a great place to go. There are three rooms to choose from each being different difficulty’s. We chose the Dracula’s Castle room. The room is challenging, but it’s definitely fun. I appreciated the small details in the room such as the way clues were presented. In most escape rooms, its either a screen with text or a walkie talkie. I believe it was a walkie talkie of some sort but it was cleverly used to look like it’s actually supposed to be there. Puzzles were great, being just two of us we were kind of worried how difficult it would be to maneuver the way through the puzzles, but I found the mix of puzzles with both working together along with hands on activity’s to be great. The room is linear which not everyone loves, me personally I don’t love linear but I’ll be honest, it’s the best by far linear game I’ve played because there’s so many steps to that one task which made it really enjoyable. As far as theming goes, I must say that I was impressed, I felt like there was some really cool elements that meshed well into the story world, music being one of them along with a sense of urgency to complete the task just because I felt really immersed. And finally the game master, he was beyond kind and outgoing for us. He helped us make it through since it was the hardest room and even letting us stay the extra few minutes to finish the room. Much appreciated for that, as most escape rooms don’t even tell you where you went wrong if you didn’t make it out. Overall this venue is a 5 star experience from the moment you walk in til the moment you leave. If you are a hard core enthusiast or a beginner definitely add Escape Room Extreme to the list of must do’s because you won’t be...

On a recent trip the red tide impacted gulf, I participated in 10 different escape rooms offered by 7 different organizations and will review all 7 so others can compare.

My party of two took on the “da Vinci’s Office.” We were flying through the room initially and I was thinking this could have been the best room we had ever done. We probably came close to completing half of the room in about 20 minutes; however, then things changed when we hit the puzzle box. I will admit – I don’t get puzzle boxes. I get a lot of other puzzles – you know, when you can look at it and start figuring it out. With puzzle boxes, the only thing I see when looking at one is a hammer destroying it. My partner who tends to enjoy them insisted something was wrong with it (which was not the case), so after 5 minutes of no progress, we asked for a hint. Like many other escape rooms, they use a monitor where the gamemaster communicates to you via messages they type on the monitor. The problem with the monitor was it never beeped to let you know a clue had been given. Additionally, it also showed you each character as the gamemaster typed it. So, I can tell you how poor of a typer our gamemaster really was. When the first hint didn’t help, we then had another 20 minutes of poor typing, no sounds, and growing frustration before we got into the puzzle box. What made matters worse with this monitor/gamemaster combo is later when we needed another hint, he originally typed the wrong “direction” in the hint. Sure, he corrected it sometime later, but I can’t tell you how timely that was because there was no beep while we were implementing the hint backwards! It was such a frustrating experience I doubt I will...