PanIQ Escape Room NYC — Attraction in New York

If you enjoy interactive escape rooms, Clue Chase will not disappoint! I will write a brief blurb about each room below, but overall Clue Chase has been one of my favorite franchises in NYC to date. I hope they open a new adventure soon! The one critique I have of the company in general is that their "theme" is based on finding an "artifact" from different time periods, but that does not really factor much into gameplay. However, there are so many positives about Clue Chase, the #1 being their staff! Everyone is animated and excited to be there, and it just makes the experience so much better! You also get a discount if you book your next adventure that day. The regular price is $35/person plus fees and taxes.

Pirates of the Bermuda Triangle - Group of 4 If you just do one room at Clue Chase, I highly recommend Pirates! This was the first one I did at the franchise, and it was SO FUN! The tasks align well with the theme, and the puzzles involve you living your best pirate life. We found the puzzles manageable, and just needed two hints from Kiana when she saw we were going astray. 4 is a good number for the room due to one of the activities requiring multiple people and some puzzles are easier when working in a team of 2.

Guardian of Gotham - Group of 4 If you prefer superheroes to pirates, this would be my second recommendation! Like Pirates, this room is extremely interactive and the puzzles rely on tech to unlock stuff. 4 is a good number for the room because there are a lot of tasks to do at first. I went with a similar group of people that I did Pirates, and we agreed that the puzzles were a little easier in Gotham than Pirates. Mac was a great moderator!

Houdini's Workshop - Group of 4 Marketed as their hardest room, Houdini's Workshop did not disappoint! The puzzles are interactive and you do need a group of 4 because there are a lot of tasks to do that can be done simultaneously. While we still had fun in the room, we liked this less than Pirates and Gotham because the puzzles were not "good" challenging. A majority of the puzzles were fine, but there were a few red herrings, and it was hard to tell which clue unlocked which lock. To me, a well designed room gives you a subtle hint as to where to look, especially if there is a lot of stimuli. Priscilla helped us through this room.

Moonshine Madness - Group of 2 This is supposedly Clue Chase's easiest room, but I strongly disagree with that assessment. I know that you're probably thinking that it's because we did it with 2 people, but we have done many escape rooms as a group of 2! I believe Moonshine Madness has the hardest puzzles. The other rooms may be trickier by quantity. I felt like we used Priscilla a lot in this room because the puzzles were not really connected. I even felt like the beginning puzzles were challenging and incorporated a few stretches. I also think the directions to do certain tasks could be more clear. It's not that I did not have fun, but this is definitely my least favorite room at Clue Chase. However, I would recommend it if you're looking for a challenge and found Pirates to be too easy.

Note: All of these experiences were...

Did the prohibition room with 6 friends. Let's start with the positives. The production values are decent and I certainly got a 1920s atmosphere from the place. The mechanics used in some of the puzzles are clever and really do have some potential to make a cool room. The host was pleasant and made sure to walk us through what we missed at the end.

Now let's get to the negatives. Some mechanics are overused to the extreme. Without giving too much away, the host starts off demonstrating that certain pictures on the wall are on hinges. Well you will soon find out that ALL of the pictures have this same mechanic. What could have been an exciting thing to discover about one clue is immediately revealed and becomes the defacto method for looking at clues to the point that you will become bored of pushing pictures out of the way to view the scribblings behind them.

One of the clues is actually there to fake you out. There's no clever way to figure out this is a fake clue. You are just supposed to try to use it, fail, and become frustrated.

Perhaps the worst offense is the incessant offering of hints. My past experience with other escape rooms is that they are generally solvable without clues, but you may ask for hints if you get stuck. It's a good system that lets people use the assistance to whatever degree they feel they need it. At this room though, you will be offered hints unprompted. My group got dozens of hints. To add insult to injury, many of the puzzles had goals that were ill-defined enough from the provided materials as to make the hints necessary.

Our host told us the room has a 30% solve rate, which is similar to most of the other escape rooms I've been to, but I find it hard to believe even 1% of groups could solve this room without any hints. Meanwhile at more well-conceived rooms, there are many more groups getting by without asking for hints.

In summary, if you are an escape room veteran, you will find this room lacking as I've described, but potentially playable if you are running out of new rooms to play. If this is your first time trying an escape room, I would try a room that plays a bit more standardly before...

This escape room takes up a whole floor in one of the buildings close the busy area of KTown. We did two rooms (Guardian of Gotham and Houdini's Workshop) with different game masters, Lou and Casey. Both of them were very nice folks who really sold into the themes of the escape rooms and tried to immerse us into the backstories. Highly recommend everyone give this a try!

Design: Houdini's room was definitely superior in terms of design due to everything from artwork and the design of the puzzles fitting into its theme better than Guardian. The Houdini room you could definitively say this is a workshop filled with the items that expose how he does magic while Guardian room you could equivalently say this might be a post-apocalyptic safe house rather than time-warp sci-fi. Don't get me wrong though, I still really liked the design of Guardian because it gave the sense of eerie and mystery associated with sci-fi. Overall, both rooms' designs were still REALLY good.

Puzzles: Here's where my partner (who did the room with me) and I differ in opinions. I felt like Guardian room did much better because I'm personally a more techy person. So, Guardian was very on point with their theme of sci-fi by making most puzzles more tech-focused. Think puzzles that required a lot of wiring and pressing buttons or placing a magnetized item in order to unlock the next clue. Meanwhile Houdini's room had 2-3 electronic puzzles overall. The Houdini room required more visual cues, matching clue hints, and locks to solve puzzles. The ending also had a big twist that you can probably guess at the beginning because it's such a recurring trick in "magic". For those who play, you'll understand the trick I'm referring to when you play this room.

Side Note: The lobby had a really funny running theme where a mannequin's body parts are scattered around. Makes it a search around the room sort of mini-game for you before entering the actual escape rooms. Probably not intentionally a mini-game but just found it too hilarious...