Escape Sacramento - Sacramento's Original Escape Room — Attraction in Sacramento

I delayed writing a review of this place because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just frustrated in the moment. My team has done many escape rooms across the country, low tech and high tech, easy and difficult. It’s been two months since we visited this escape room, and I’ve had time to marinate on the things we experienced. I’m going to do my best not to spoil or post answers.

The first problem we encountered was when the door closed, and the automated story started playing. The volume was impossibly low. One of our party is hard of hearing and couldn’t even hear that any audio was being played, we had to be quieter than a door mouse in order to be able to hear, and we still missed a clue. A transcript would have been nice.

The good escape rooms that we’ve been to all share something in common that this escape room doesn’t. An actual person watching your gameplay and interacting with you. This escape room had a cool little machine instead of a GM. Like a little alarm clock. As you solve puzzles, you drop a token into the device so the clock knows where you are in the game. This also acts like a bookmark for how you get clues. To get a clue all players must insert their token into the machine, a neat concept in theory, until the clue/help you need is beyond the pre-programmed responses loaded into the machine.

The problem with this interface is that it doesn't know how much of the puzzle you’ve already solved and only gives you two generic clues and then the answer, which could just be a vague instruction of “do (this) to (that).” The machine does not have the capability to correct whatever it is that you’re actually doing wrong.

There was a puzzle in the game that we had solved, but the thing it unlocked wasn’t triggering. As we had been trying for several minutes to get it to unlock, we decided to use a clue, only for the interface to tell us what we had already been doing. GM intervention could have helped us not waste time AND a clue, because a GM could see the problem we were having and nudge us over the edge.

In the end, after we failed the room, we asked what went wrong and recreated our play for the GM – apparently, we needed to line up an ILLEGIBLE word (which just looked like a sharpie scribble on a burlap bag to us) to a line on the wall. When I suggested they do something to make the words more legible, the GM said, “We can’t, because that would make the puzzle too easy to solve.” I’m sorry, what? You may as well print everything in Greek if you really want to "challenge" players.

Speaking of bad puzzles, our room also had a “scent” puzzle, where you had to spray something and identify the smell to guess the word to unlock a lock. What we smelled was not the answer they were looking for, so we wasted another of our clues to get the answer. Also, gross; nothing like having to spray a musty mystery liquid in a closed room and spilling it on yourself with no way to clean up. I guess a labeled bottle would also have been too easy.

I was flabbergasted when our game master flat-out told us that making the clues easier to read would make the puzzles too easy. I get that you want a room to be a challenge, but the average person should still be able to interpret what you're trying to do.

The room itself mostly made sense…until we got to the second room, then everything went completely off the rails. Nothing was linear after we opened the second room. Most escape rooms have clues that lead you to the next clue, at some point, this one abandoned all sense of story or plot. It was like stepping into a completely different game.

The automated clues thing is a cool piece of technology, but at some point, you need human intervention, if only to say, “You’re on the right track, but you’re doing this part wrong,” Or, “You’ve got it, just wiggle this part a little bit to get it to work”

They touted this room as their hardest game, with the highest fail rate. We weren’t out to prove it wrong, but we certainly did not expect it to be as random and as disjointed as it...

Unfortunately, this review was long overdue. However, after a recent experience at a different escape room in the area, I decided to post a review detailing my experience.

First off, I would like to mention that my group and I have done many escape rooms. Each one of us has done 20+. Our first escape room was Fortune's Favor, and it was incredible. The set, puzzles, and riddles were amazing. We even made it on the leaderboard! Our game master was a tall man with curly hair, and he was helpful.

Because of this great experience, we decided to do the Crypt. Our experience for this game was horrible to say the least. The room was outdated, and the puzzles weren't intriguing. However, we still were looking forward to it as the same game master we had for Fortune's Favor was there. We are doing the room, and for a solid 20 minutes, we cannot get past the puzzle at all. Having done so many escape rooms, we thought we were simply stuck. We simply would ask for guidance from the game master, but it wasn't necessarily helpful. We continue to the point of frustration, and we were then certain that there was something faulty with the room. It simply did not make sense. After 25 minutes of the 60 minutes spent, we request the game master to come in. He comes in and sees that there was a whole portion of the game missing. He did not set the room correctly. However, we understand that everyone is human and makes mistakes. We were understanding until he let us know that he would not extend the time nor give us a refund or even a partial refund. He made no effort to fix the issue although he was at fault. If you are someone who does escape rooms on your own time, you would understand how frustrating this situation is, so it shocking to me that he did not even attempt to reconcile.

The mood after that went sour as we felt as if we were not given a fair shot at completing the room. Recently, our group had an experience at a different escape room in Rancho Cordova where the power went out in the building. Scarred from our last experience at Escape Sac, we thought we would have to pay having only completed 25% of the room. However, they were so accommodating. They gave us a full refund and even allowed us to continue completing the room. After that, my group and I reflected once again at our sour experience at Escape Sacramento and decided to...

If you're in a rut, trying to avoid doing the same old thing on a Friday night, escape rooms might just be your next addiction. Seriously. These things are a blast. Get some of your bored friends together and get down to Escape Sacramento.

Having done four rooms at two other locations on the East Coast, I was excited to get out and do a room here on the West Coast. Our office rented out the facility for a few hours one day, divided up, and went to town. Escape Sacramento definitely didn't let us down.

My group, which contained both experienced players and novices alike, did the Gallery room, which definitely presents some great challenges. We encountered quite a few elements that those of us with experience hadn't seen before. We had a ton of fun with it. It's not the hardest room I've ever encountered (that superlative is reserved for a room at another location in Florida in which the team starts out divided between two locked jail cells while bound and blindfolded), but it was definitely on the harder end of the continuum. So, if you like a challenge, it's a good room like that.

Escape Sacramento has two other rooms, one that's a pure escape game (and, supposedly, a little easier) and one that's a heist game where you're trying to collect as much cash as possible. Others in our group had a ton of fun in both rooms. I'm anxious to get back down there and try out the others.

The staff onsite were super nice. They're helpful and enthusiastic. You can tell they're really into what they do, which is awesome. Plus, they were extremely patient corralling our large office group, which has the tendency to require herculean efforts to herd.

Just a quick note... the Gallery room will not be open much longer, so if you're a junkie for escape games, get in quick. Per the staff, it's slated to be replaced with a newer room later this...