Escape the Room Philadelphia — Attraction in Philadelphia

To be fair, if this is your first escape room its still going to be a... neat, and fun experience. That said, this is a clumsy, over priced, novice attempt at a cheaply created, not very immersive, escape room experience. I've done about 16 escape rooms, this ranked 2nd worst ever.

The dig .... well i really nailed my groups (6 people) opinion above but ill give some non spoiler specifics and reasons for the poor review.

Ventilation discomfort: First room is so hot they have a box fan propped on a chair (-so immersive), and it still was stuffy and hot. 2. The setup was not checked well before we arrived. Early on, two boxes with locks were actually left open, so we felt little motivation to leave the contents unseen until we found the key fairly, but we did find them. 3. Our host- Young girl, certainly making minimum wage and showing it, gave 0 excitement to the introduction. However she made up for it by giving too much- in the way of clues, everytime we didnt put our "finds" together correctly and nearly instantly. This can be a difficult balance for your host. Here's the key, hosts of the future: timing. If we struggle for 3-5 minutes, thinking and trying possibilities, LET US TRY AND SOLVE IT, THAT'S THE FUN PART! Now when it's like 10 minutes OR WE look like we're standing still and lost significant momentum on the same puzzle (look for frustrated body language), OR if we figured out what to do but its a technicality: ("push on that wall really hard, its tricky") yes, please help. In our case the radio (two rooms back) kept calling us to go to it-like "no, do it this way" -this does not feel immersive, its more like I'm a game avatar and she's controlling me through the experience. I read other reviews and see most people complete with 20 minutes left and this is why. Those twenty minuts -sprinkled throughout our time most likely would have been plenty of time to solve the puzzles and problems ourselves, and made it feel like an accomplishment. Frankly failing sucks, but id rather fail then be lead that much. 4. The entire game was more linear than usual. Instead of splitting up into small groups, (you work on this problem, we'll do this -at the same time) most of the time one thing was being accomplished by a couple people while the rest waited for something to do. Most clues and keys were more or less just sitting somewhere (designers are like "let's draw a symbol on a chair", that's reasonable~). 5. Lastly visually, the majority of spaces felt like installation art projects made by high school kids on a small budget when compared to really good escape rooms which are far more immersive, with 3d printed original props, movie quality environments and strong puzzle solving, are similarly priced. My group leader expressed it best: "if there weren't ones like this, we wouldn't appreciate the good ones as much." Heard Cherry Hill has a great one, try that...

Had a really frustrating experience at this place.

One of the early locks had the wrong number code solution, which did not match the clue. This resulted in wasting almost 30 minutes until the lock opened from a random guess. The "correct" answer was verbally suggested and attempted at least twice, which should have been an indicator to the clue master that they set up the room wrong, but they clearly were not listening. At the end of the experience, we asked the clue master about the lock and she told us what the code was supposed to be; we immediately informed her the actual code was another number but she could not have cared less, did not apologize, and just told us to leave so she could set up the room for the next group (I hope they set it up right for them). It wouldn't have been so insulting if she at least acknowledged the mistake, but she outright refused to even look at the lock when we tried to show her it didn't open with the intended solution. She had even said over the speaker that we had not tried the correct number yet; considering we tried the intended solution twice and it did not work, we had no reason to think that they were not listening (and thus would have told us if there was a problem).

The Dig was poorly maintained. There were visible wires and a leg of a table was unscrewed (unrelated to a clue puzzle, apparently), showing a lack of attention to detail. One of the puzzles involved a magnet, which did not work to open a door at first and required the clue master to tell us over the speaker that the mechanism was finicky and that we should keep trying until it opened. Compared to other escape room venues, this one seemed to be poorly maintained and have much worse production value.

Our time was interrupted and we were scolded for violating rules that had not been previously stated, including ones that were not intuitive for an escape room. Don't move any furniture, including small side tables? Don't unscrew anything, even though there's an unscrewed table leg sitting in the corner? Then it turns out later that you are in fact supposed to move a large, furniture-like decoration to find a critical item. Never mind the fact that our efforts to solve the room were getting more desperate because we lost 30 minutes to a misconfigured lock.

To add insult to injury, they tell you that you can rebook for a discount with 'REDEMPTION' if you want to try again. No thanks, already wasted more than $300 on a substandard experience.

I would not go back to this venue or recommend...

I was very disappointed by the extremely rude staff in this escape the room game. We went to the escape the room yesterday for my gf's birthday. Despite mention on their website about having something special for birthdays, they actually did not do anything, not even say happy birthday to her. Several of us, including myself and the birthday girl, missed our train. My gf's mother said the staff was unnecessarily rude about starting the clock before we arrived, especially considering that according to their website where we bought the tickets they didn't have any other customers that evening (maybe this should have been a red flag, but it was a Monday night...) Fine, I get that, technically we paid for a certain time that ends at a certain time, but he didn't have to be rude about it. Still for the most part my gf, her family, our friends, and our two kids (ages 4 and 6) were having a good time. We made quite a lot of progress in the 50 minutes they allowed us and just as the timer went off we discovered the final key. Literally all we needed was 10 seconds to walk across the room and stick it in the lock. Instead of considering the birthday, the small children, the fact that we lost 10 minutes from our time because of missing the train, the $300 we spent to buy the room out (we were told we had to buy the room out to bring the 4 year old) the guy would not spot us 10 seconds. Oh he let me walk across the room and stick the key in the lock.... but then went on to label us "losers" and wanted a picture with signs that said we lost when we had in fact solved every single puzzle. Then he went through and explained all the puzzles we had just solved as if the fact that I needed 10 more seconds to get across the room meant that we hadn't understood how to solve the puzzles (did he think I pulled the key out of my ass?) The whole time I'm thinking, "you wouldn't let us start late, but saved time for this?" I don't understand how anyone can expect to run any kind of business and have their staff treat customers so inconsiderately. We will never return to this escape the room and we will make sure no one we know goes here. There's a better one in KOP, and also "The Amazing Escape the Room" is nearby in Philly that we will try next...