Beat The Lock Escape Room — Attraction in San Jose

One of the strangest escape room experiences I've had.. We signed up as a party of 6 for the attic room. Overview of the rules and room backstory were exceedingly brief, ~1 min and given by our game master Connor. The puzzles were disjointed and a bit random, with almost all of them involving opening locks.

Around 15 min in, the gamemaster says something over the intercom but no one hears him clearly because we were all talking. We asked him to repeat what he said, waved hands at the camera.. no response. It was at that point I realized they never gave us a walkie talkie to communicate despite signs and other reviews mentioning them. Maybe that wasn't a feature for this room? We just carried on and assumed it was a time warning, despite no other time warnings or communication from the game master for the remainder of the game.

Our group was later stumped on 2 of the clues, and had already used the hints outside the door. We waved our hands at the camera, called out for a hint, even walked out of the room to see if anyone could help us... no one was there. Alright, maybe help isn't allowed for this room? A bit strange since every escape room I've been to allows players to ask for additional help. After a while of brute forcing, it started to seem like a lot more than 60 minutes had elapsed, but there was no way to tell since we didn't get any more time warnings. It was as if the game master stopped viewing our game and forgot we were there.

Then suddenly he opens the door and says times up, there's no time to go over the answers. No explanation why, he snaps a picture of us, says goodnight, and then ducks away. We look at our phones and it's 12 min over the end time. I'm not sure why they ended us late given we arrived 15-20 min early. Part of me feels like he forgot about us and maybe forgot to give us walkie talkies too? Either way it left us feeling unsatisfied, like we were bumbling around for an hour for no reason, and then told to leave without any real resolution of the game. It was such a strange experience and definitely not worth the money. We also suspected that some of the clues (ie the tile puzzle) were not arranged correctly, but we could be wrong.. who knows though, they never gave us...

I did the Sound of Murder room. I was pretty disappointed with the overall experience. This review focuses solely on that particular room's design, so your mileage may vary with other rooms.

I felt like the riddles were extremely convoluted. The solutions seemed haphazardly put together and a majority of the riddles themselves had very little relevance to the plot. A riddle for riddle's sake... the design felt very unimaginative. Trust me, I like hard puzzles and interesting problems... but in my opinion escape games riddles should be clever, cool, or even just something you can't wait to tell your friends about. Almost none of the riddles had that effect on me... I was just left standing there thinking, "seriously? That's what you came up with?"

Another huge issue I had with the room design was the excessive number of combination locks (I know it's an escape room but come on... Can't we be a little more creative??). Again, I felt like the game designers were really unimaginative here.

Nothing distinguished this room in a good way. For me it was quite boring, with lackluster riddles and a very convoluted plot. Maybe other rooms here are better, or maybe you would actually love this room. It's all subjective anyway.

The staff was nice but that seemed to be the only redeeming factor for...

Spy Room (one of the three themes you can choose from) was hilariously bad. Red herrings (many of which were pretty deep; seemed like pieces from a previous escape room) everywhere, which was unsatisfying when 3/4 of them led to nothing and the rest, even when they were legitimate clues, were half-finished (e.g. piece of a puzzle which we didn't strictly need to solve that particular lock, but which would've finished a puzzle, just never materialized). "Final" clues themselves were terrible as well -- without going into too much detail, one was literally written out with zero hints to point or solve towards it; just a simple scramble and that was it. And this was one of the three main objectives necessary to solve the whole room! Backstory nonexistent. Had a couple very cool props which were actually functional (!!!) but purely props and played no role in the final solve. Utterly unsatisfying and poorly...