The Great Room Escape San Diego — Attraction in San Diego

My group and I did the “Mad Lab” escape room. Initially I thought the experience was alright, I’ve had better experiences but at least the puzzles were fun… but every time I think about the room and talk with my group about our experience I get more and more disappointed.

Let’s talk about the room itself: the room was spacious and looked nice! The atmosphere was cool. Looked like a cool lab. It had some cool puzzles that actually required some skill or brain power. Most of our time was spent just searching for things though and getting confused about what is and isn’t part of the puzzles. There was instance where there was a fuse box on the wall we weren’t sure was part of the puzzle… We didn’t want to be flipping random fuses on and off so we just asked if it’s part of the room and the staff kinda rudely responded “I can’t answer that”.

Which brings us to the biggest issue: the staff. The room has a staff member “dressed as a mad scientist” with us. She honestly killed the entire vibe and is the reason this review is so low. I don’t know what we did to annoy her but she had an attitude with us the whole time. She was getting annoyed that we “weren’t listening” to her vague hints of “hey you need to find something” or “you should solve the puzzles”. Apparently it’s very important to “turn on the machine” in the lab (which is just another random puzzle, nothing special about it. We would’ve done it eventually) and when asked what we should do first she got annoyed and asked why no one was listening when we couldn’t answer such a vague question. She deliberately wasted our time in the “decontamination room” when we had already finished the room and ran down our clock because we couldn’t leave without our friends. She made us do dumb things in the decontamination room like play patty cake and be in a air guitar band? I’m not looking for Shakespearean acting here… just at least some amount of keeping with the atmosphere…. She just wasn’t in it, was bringing down our vibe, and started throwing prop beakers at us along the ground because she was “clumsy and had accidentally contaminated us”. Would’ve been a better experience without her there.

In short, the puzzles were good, but the experience REEKED of low effort from the opening presentation that was a collection of middle school level word art and random gifs (from South Park REALLY??) to the staff that obviously didn’t want to be there.

Maybe if you get lucky with a staff that wants to be there or get a room without the staff in it it’ll be fun! I don’t mind staff standing out of the way or not hamming it up to play the role but at least don’t bring...

So there was 4 of us that wanted to go and originally one person could not make it. Shortly after our other person was going to be able to go. We tried to go online to rebook it and get the 4th person in and the website wouldn't let not let us update the amount of players even though they have rooms available. long story short get there and we're on standby for the last player and the other groups fourth person did not show up and Rachel told us at 12:50 if the other person was not there, our 4th person would be able to enter. So at 12:50 we went to them and said that we wanted our fourth person so Racheal walked upstairs to the other group who's 4th person was not there and told them that we had to get started and invited the mom who was not participating to take the 4th spot.

Mind you we had been there for over a half hour and had already paid for 4 people as well.

She had already promised it to us so I then proceeded to go down to tell my friend what happened and she follows me and proceeds to kick me out of the room because she didn't like the fact I was saying what happened in a room with everybody else.

I WAS NOT raising my voice, I was not being disrespectful and she proceeded to kick me out anyway.

I had a discussion with her after where I caught her on video admitting that she didn't like that I was upset and said she would tell her boss I was making a scene and that's why she kicked me out, then contradicts herself and admits I in fact was not making a scene and that I was removed because she didnt like that i questioned her ethics in not honoring her promise.

So as we speak my party is in the game right now and I am sitting outside waiting for them.

I will never ever do business with them again and when I asked for her Management's name and number she refused to give it to me! Telling me she was the manager and basically I need to deal with it. ( mind you I have her on video and then when she realizes I'm videoing her... her attitude totally changes) Someone should really teach her and this business how customer service works and that lying to people is...

I went to this escape room on a Saturday afternoon. Plenty of parking, staff was wearing masks.

We did the Lost Tomb room.

The room itself was your standard escape room experience with fewer chambers and puzzle variety than expected. Some puzzles felt more brute-forcey and trying to throw the participants off rather than something novel or clever. One of the machines/mechanisms in the escape room was finnicky and broken, costing us some confusion and time.

Main concern with this experience was staff attitude. Staff was pretty apathetic, and instead of hyping us up before the room, asked us why we didn't look excited. When we escaped the room, we were confused because staff took longer than expected to come out, and didn't really give us the typical satisfaction of completing an escape room. She did not even offer to take our group picture with the signs and stuff at the end (this is the first escape room where staff did not offer to take our picture), she went straight back into her office. It rubbed me the wrong way. Would recommend looking somewhere else in San Diego for an...