BrainXcape Escape Room NYC — Attraction in New York

I unfortunately had a negative experience in The Pirate’s Heart, made worse by my concerns not being taken very seriously by the GM and game owner(s). This was especially a shame, because I had completed both Haunted Hotel and Rikers many years ago, and loved them.

Breakdown for reasons below:

MY PERSONAL GAME: We unfortunately realized late game that our room had been improperly reset. There was a particular item that wasn’t in the spot it should have been. After manyminutes, the GM finally asked if we just couldn’t find the item where it was supposed to be. It had been misplaced elsewhere in the room during reset. I’m a game master too, so I get mistakes happen. But when we asked the GM in person about this after failing the room, he sort of made it our fault saying something like: “well think of it this way - you could have just located it at any point!” I would argue that wasn’t the point. And I know that when I am a Game Master myself, I pause the clock or add time at the VERY least for something that is entirely my own fault.

WEAR AND TEAR: There’s no denying that the room’s decor and ambience are top notch (as are the other rooms here). However, many of the decor and prop pieces amount to visual clue information. One puzzle in particular requires you to observe certain things in the room that visually match each other. The wear and tear of these objects make it such that it’s not actually possible or logical to make these objects match. Wear and tear does not normally bother me in and of itself, but…

PRICING: …this room charges a premium. MY partner and I paid $81 EACH and change (inclusive of fees). As I said, I usually am forgiving of wear and tear (I get from GM’ing myself that people are monstrous wrecking balls), but when you are charging significantly more than any other escape room in the tristate area, it’s inexcusable not to repair your room, especially the parts that are important clues - furthermore make sure the rooms are reset correctly.

MENTAL LEAPS: Not only if this room a LOT of puzzles (and largely linear, so also not great for big groups as a result, which doesn’t help keep your ticket price down), the solutions often require huge mental leaps. I don’t want to spoil anything, but some of these leaps were pretty egregious and go beyond wanting to facepalm and into “are you kidding me?” territory

FOLLOW UP: When following up with the company by email to express all of the above, I was not satisfied with their reaction. My main concern above all was the GM not taking the room reset error seriously (and basically gaslighting us), especially given the room was such a hefty pricing premium to book. I also expressed my disappointment given how much I’ve loved past rooms here. With the pricing concern, I was advised via email that they price this way becuse most other rooms do not guarantee private experiences. However, that’s actually untrue, as in my experience the vast majority of the 60+ rooms around the country (and even in Europe) that I’ve completed have all been exclusively private bookings since the pandemic (a fact many escapers would likely corroborate). Adding insult to injury, they refused to acknowledge these errors, mistakes, and wear and tear. They did offer a tiny discount on a future game…but if this game is indicative of their other new games, I’ve much less interest in doing them than I would be in receiving a discount to make up for the sour one my partner and I had. It’s really the only time I’ve ever been an escape room where I wish I had gone somewhere else.

This room has SO much potential. I LOVE escape rooms and I loved the original two rooms here. I have never gone out of my way to give this sort of feedback on a room before.

UPDATE (to Owner Reply): I also don’t condone harassment; nor do I believe I’ve made threats. But I asked for further response, and never received. It’s unfortunate we continue to disagree, especially as I’ve maintained this was very out of character with my past...

I've done several hundred of escape rooms / escape room games, now including every room currently offered at this location. This place is probably the #1 or 2 best at decoration and immersion out of all the NYC escape rooms. If that's what's most important to you, go to this one.

For me, I have never left escape rooms more frustrated than when I leave this place. For one, they usually have all the lights off and then yell at you nonstop until you put your phone/flashlight in their box. So for those who don't see well, you're in trouble, especially because so many of their props involve hard-to-read cursive text that is extremely worn out from other players and locks with the numbers largely worn out. How terrible. And they don't even respond to polite requests to turn up the lights for those who have disabilities or are older or whatever. I'm pretty sure all the great reviews must be from ppl who just don't know better.

We just did their newest room, which had an element where you're supposed to solve a puzzle by guessing. Yes, guessing. We politely asked for the answer - which in any other escape room they would give once all have agreed, but this room wouldn't. We were ready to just give up. How much did we pay to just guess? Even when the game master came in after, she confirmed we were supposed to guess (if the company is reading this, I am referring to the need to guess which switches to turn up, as there was zero signposting as to which ones to do to make the colors match what we knew they were supposed to be after having solved the rest of the puzzle through proper logical signposting).

Honestly, a good game master could have saved the day for us in virtually every one of these rooms. But none of them seem to care whether you had a good time, and only care about following dumb rules, like making sure hints are cryptic and confusing, putting phones away, refusing to show the parts you missed at the end after failing, and not having a timer or countdown clock in any of their rooms. No other escape room I've ever seen does any of that, and honestly, what is up with making it too hard to see anything absent a single terrible flashlight even for those who express that they can't see (a consistent theme in every room).

So glad to be done with this location forever -- even though I personally love their fantastic decoration and immersion. I guess for me a frustrating and un-fun experience can overcome even the most well-designed artistic sets...

We did the Rikers, 1932 escape room, and it was very well designed and did provide a spooky atmosphere that we liked. The escape room itself was very well designed, but we didn’t have the best experience with our game master.

At a certain point, one of our items got stuck in a gadget (not revealing what to not spoil the escape room), and we were asking the game master for help but he did not help us or say anything on the monitor for 10+ minutes until we kept asking for assistance over and over.

After 10+ minutes he finally said where the backup item was so that we won’t have to rely on the original item. It should not have taken this long to help us, and we felt we wasted 10+ minutes because this happened.

We asked for medium difficulty which provides two hints over every 10 minutes. There were instances where we should’ve had another hint during those 10 minutes but the game master just ignored us and didn’t say anything or even acknowledge us when we asked for a hint. It would’ve been helpful if he at least said in the monitor that we don’t have any hints left during our 10 minute interval.

We felt we were being ignored or not acknowledged throughout our experience during the escape room. Overall we had a pretty poor experience with our escape room.

EDIT IN RESPONSE TO OWNER: While I appreciate the due diligence that you did in making sure that our escape room experience was up to par, I believe customer satisfaction is more important than a trivial rule where we have limited hints per every 10 minutes.

As the owner said, we dropped our key item in an area in which we could not retrieve the lost item. It is impossible to advance without utilizing that key item. If we cannot advance the escape room any further due to a key item being lost, it would've been a lot better if the game master helped us out immediately instead of waiting until our next two hints are "unlocked" after ten minutes to tell us the location of the backup item. That way those ten minutes of our time did not have to be wasted in which we were not able to do anything until our game master helped us out. In addition, telling us where the backup item is should not have counted as a hint, as this isn't a hint to help solve a puzzle. This was a situation where we could not do anything until the game master helped us.

And as I mentioned before, it would’ve been helpful if he at least said in the monitor that we don’t have any hints left during our...