Escape In Time - Escape Rooms — Attraction in Madison

We've been to many escape rooms, and we've even set records in a couple of them. I've seen high tech rooms and low tech rooms and honestly this was in between. Their special effects were neat, and their game masters really sold their performance. If you're here for a fun show this is a good place to go, however, if you're like me you prefer the puzzles. So here I will list my biggest complaints. The 'puzzles' were very linear. You did A which led to B which led to C. There were no side puzzles to work on, no red herrings for fun. Just one to the next, which only a couple of people could work on at one time, leaving the rest of your group feeling useless. Which leads to point number two... Their group numbers were way too high for how linear the puzzles are. Everyone in our group was experienced at escape rooms, yet only a couple of us were engaged in the puzzles at any given time. Ideally the room we were in would be llayep by no more than four people, half of the "recommended" number of participants. Technical errors. We experienced a technical error during our play through which we spent several precious minutes on trying to fix and then we were almost reluctantly given the work around to fix the puzzle. I get it, the room is brand new and I've played new games before and helped test ones, but from what I could tell they knew about this error and simply decided not to fix it before releasing this game to the public, which seems unprofessional to me. The price. Not really a complaint, more of just an observation, this room is more expensive than most rooms I've seen. For the price I had high hopes that this room would at least be fun for an hour, instead I found myself wishing I had just stayed home and saved the money for something better and this is the first time I've ever experienced that with an escape room.

I'm not saying it was an awful experience, just that there was an opportunity to do a lot better and instead there was too much of a focus on special effects and less on actually creating fun and engaging puzzles. We made it out of the room in time but the feeling of accomplishment wasn't there and it just felt bland instead. I don't intend to return to these rooms and I hope my review helps people consider what kindnof escape room they want to do. Again, this one had neat effects and a cool story, but their puzzles left a lot...

I mostly want to warn others that they will book your room for up to 8 people, you'll be mixed with other groups. If you have done this before and expected to have your room just with the tickets you booked, be forewarned you might be with strangers. If you find out late, you won't be able to get your money back and they'll charge you a 50% rebooking fee (but then again...it seems like you can't really do the rooms as just a date night anymore...unless you want to pay $240 for all 8 tickets).

We had done 2 rooms in the past, but both in the pandemic and didn't realize this was the norm. They switched back to doing this in August apparently. I didn't see the text saying this on the website, it's amongst a lot of other text at the bottom of the room descriptions. Since we had done this twice as a date night we didn't really expect this, and the text isn't called out prominently. My husband booked via phone and nobody told him outright that more people would be booked in the room. It was only once we arrived that we were told 6 other people would be joining us, and it really caught us off guard. We also thought the response that we would have a 50% rebooking fee (which, honestly, yes the text says people would be in our room, but we had no idea and felt swindled, so a fee on top of that just felt like a low blow) was fairly guarded, like we weren't the first couple to be surprised by this. If you have a group of 8 people, the rooms are fun, but honestly that seems like a lot of people to fit in these rooms. We decided to walk away that night, for one I'm uncomfortable with the covid risk still of being that close to strangers and for another it just doesn't sound very fun to do the rooms...

I was extremely disappointed with the Captain's Cove room. All the puzzles and clues were very unintuitive. When we managed to solve them, I thought "wait, THAT'S what you're supposed to do with this???" without any feeling of satisfaction or accomplishment. Because of this utter lack of direction, we even solved one puzzle on accident by doing random things with an object we found, which really shouldn't be a 'feature' in any escape room.

Also, most solutions required you to do something with an object, meaning one person in your group ran around with said object and tried to find where it goes or what it does while everyone else mostly stood around doing nothing. It was all very uncooperative. Another example of poor design is that we had solved a particular puzzle and tried the correct solution, but it had to be executed very perfectly/precisely and so we wasted even more time because we thought we were missing something or doing it wrong.

I will say that the atmosphere was top notch and the room was very well decorated. However... most everything that isn't part of a puzzle is literally glued down so that really broke the immersion. Another questionable feature of the room's atmosphere is that the lighting was extremely sparse and the room was very dark. We wasted a lot of time on something because none of us actually saw the clue that was in a rather obvious location. I'm not writing this review as a sore loser either as we eventually solved the puzzle, but even so I still...