Mystery Escape Room — Attraction in Salt Lake City

AVOID AVOID AVOID the Blackbeard room here at all costs!! I have done none of the other rooms so I cannot comment on the establishment as a whole.

I run escape rooms myself for work and have never seen such a frustratingly implemented room in my life. On top of that, the room wasn’t run by a human, but an AI bot! I do oppose AI on a personal level and am appalled that this institution has chosen to replace a human job with a glorified chat bot. We didn’t notice the room would have AI involved when booking, the disclosure is so minimal- only a badge on the room photo and nothing in the text blurb.

The AI bot wasn’t good at its job, either. At all. Because there was a bot running the room for us- weird choice, by the way- there were no video or audio feeds placed going out to real employees. We could’ve been doing ANYTHING. ANYTHING. in there and the employees wouldn’t have known! Because there was nobody real monitoring us, our group kept doing puzzles incorrectly or focusing on things in the wrong order and screwed our whole game up. When we did ask the AI for help, “he” would often give us wrong or unhelpful answers, or straight up REVEAL the correct one.

It was implied to us when we were prepped for the room that this AI was still being trained- oh, it showed. First of all, why am I PAYING to train your AI game master for you? If you’ve decided to go this (stupid) route, the AI should be locked by the time consumers interact with it. It was obvious that at some point the AI had gotten confused with its instructions as well, and would refer to ‘an app thing’ when we prompted it for clues. Spoiler, the ‘app thing’ was itself. It seemed like the AI would get confused when it had to prompt us to use its own functions, of which there were multiple.

The other function of the ‘app thing’ was a function called key words. This was not explained to us well, but essentially we would have to discover certain words around the room and type them into a specific slot on the interface, and then receive a specific audio or text prompt back. Each time we needed to use a key word we had to radio to an employee for more direction, since the AI wasn’t giving us anything useful. The employee knew ‘he’ was unreliable too, even joking with us at the beginning about ‘him’ often acting as if ‘he’ were drunk when groups used him. Why is he our only lifeline then!

One of the most frustrating parts was that there was a huge section to the room that had large errors in it. I unlocked a box- the lock was on backwards, also- and received a bound story. We were supposed to go through the story and press specific buttons when their namesake was listed- however, the text version was outdated, and we spent about ten minutes trying to find a portrait of a man who didn’t exist. There was an option to listen to the story through the key word function, but the audio story was SEVEN MINUTES LONG so of course we were going to try the fast way through the text. It ended up being that the only way to complete the puzzle was through the audio version… but since no one was watching or listening to us do this puzzle we weren’t corrected until it was far too late, and we lost the room. The employee had known for the whole day that the book was wrong, too, it wasn’t a new thing, so it should have been removed before we got there.

When we were taken out of the room, our employee told us that 98% of people who tried to do this room failed. What! How is your success rate 2%???? That’s insane! From what it sounded like, almost 3/4 of people who did the room only got to try half of the puzzles. I’m sorry, but that’s such an insult. Escape rooms are supposed to be fun, not impossible, confusing, and contradictory. The whole room is littered with AI influence- AI art, AI puzzles, everything.

We also were required to buy four tickets to play. This establishment forces you to pay a minimum rate of ~$150 to do any puzzle. Horrendous.

This whole thing was a...

The most unexpected thing about playing escape rooms in the Salt Lake City area is how many businesses are mindful of the need for couple date-night experiences, and how cleverly they are able to tailor bigger rooms to suit smaller ones. Mystery Escape Room, with locations in Salt Lake City as well as Tucson, did just that with their European Café mystery game, Café Amour, which we picked because it was a 40-minute escape room designed for 2 people, and it was rated mildly challenging.

When we were booking our game, we saw on the web site that Mystery Escape Room does not offer refunds on cancelled bookings, but are more than happy to reschedule our visit, or place our tickets on will call to be used at any time and does not ever expire, which was good, because it was a bit of a drive for us to get to The Gateway shopping mall in downtown Salt Lake City. We need not have worried, however: getting to The Gateway was not a bad drive at all on a Saturday morning. The standard mall parking offered off street have their own app so it took us a while to get out of the car, but a short walk through the mall concourse, then up and down the escalator later and we found ourselves at the escape room – 30 full minutes before opening time at noon!

Happily, the door was unlocked, and we were able to seat ourselves in the lobby and look through the 3-D image books and Elf-on-a-Shelf photo album while waiting. There were also puzzles on the bookcase, which was held a surprise in itself. Our fantastic game host, Kiki, was able to fit us a whole half hour early, which was more than great, because it was already 98°F out at 11:30am, and there was scant shade in the outdoor mall.

The introductory video was self-produced and very amusing, and just gave Kiki the exact amount of time to get the room ready early and show us into the very dark second lobby. The game started even before we entered Lobby 2, and even that was only the preamble to our real experience, which finally started after we made our way through a themed doorway.

Café Amour is a perfect date-night (or day) G1 (very low-tech, with conventional locks and lots of brain work) game, which took us to the streets of old Europe, from the glass-stained windows to the wood-and-brick décor. The rules of the game were laid out clearly ahead of time, and Kiki was terrific keeping us on track - very important for a short-term room. Since this game is a more intimate game within at least two other rooms, we really appreciated the clear labels on what was not part of the game. Our favourite puzzle was the one we had to solve using playing cards, and although the word association puzzle was interesting, it was also confusing because it didn't seem in-theme. This probably had to do with the fact that Café Amour was part of a larger experience, and our exit also did not seem to fully complete the one (café mystery) experience. It was / is, however, a clever way to entice us to continue our escape room experience with them again. This was our only gripe, and why this is a four-star review rather than a 5. The short-term rooms at The Escape Date and A Great Escape (both previously reviewed) were more dedicated and focused. That said, we really enjoyed our time at Café Amour and the big perk was the freebie take-home at the end. There was a clock in the room that was not used but our time of 33:45 was meticulously tracked by Kiki, who actually did a five-star job.

We remain constantly surprised by how ingeniously all the different rooms in Utah are conceptualized and built, and we are really appreciative of how all our game hosts so far have taken the trouble to appear in costume and character. Our games have not been just “our” games, and it’s so refreshing to see gamemasters enjoying our game along with us. We can’t wait to try out the other rooms offered by Mystery Room – and soon!

This review has been posted on both...

We opted for the Witch Escape, which is a two-person game. We arrived on time. I asked about a restroom, which they do not have. We were told to go upstairs or across the way for the restrooms. There was another larger group that we had to wait for before the game host played the video outlining the rules. They finally showed up, which cut into our time by nearly 15 minutes. After watching the video and then being taken into the "time portal," we were already over 20 minutes into our 60-minute reservation. Our time for the game was only 40 minutes, so I was getting pretty anxious. The game host was less than enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, which made everything kinda awkward and unexciting. When she led us to the room, she said she'd come around every ten minutes to check in, and she only came by twice, once to check in and then a second time to tell us we had 5 minutes left.

I would say the difficulty score of 8/10 was pretty accurate because some of the puzzles were impossible to figure out without a hint from the box or game host (the first time she came around). This isn't a good thing. Specifically, we were supposed to have 7 potions by the time we arrived at the next clue and only had 6. We spent precious time trying to find the 7th and ended up reading a hint to figure it out. It was in a place that you would've found it by pure luck. It didn't make sense to me why they hid the potion there without including at least a hair of hint in the clues as to its location. There was also another issue that said you need to match symbols on the potions to the symbol on the box to open it. This is false. There was only one matching symbol on the potion to the box (it was a heart), and the potion didn't open the box. The game host happened to be checking in at that moment (the first check) and we told her we were struggling with this particular puzzle. She gave us the hint and it opened. Turns out, we had to look at the potion recipes and use deductive reasoning to figure out which one would open the boxes, which again, was not mentioned in the clues. If the clue says "match the symbol on the potion to the symbol on the box to open it", you'd think that's what you'd have to do. The last puzzle was very difficult but I think if we had an extra 5ish minutes, or not so many set-backs in the prior puzzles, we could've solved it. Five minutes before the end of our hour reservation, the game host said our time was up. After the 25ish minute delay in the beginning, and ending 5 minutes before the hour, our 40-minute game time was just barely over 30 minutes.

I love escape rooms and I'm clever with riddles, but this experience left me frustrated. I think the issues I mentioned above with the game host, general time management and adjustments to the clues would make a big difference. Side note: some sort of background sounds or music would've added so much more to the whole element. For $66, I would've appreciated a...