Escape Utah Sandy- Formerly Enigma Escape Games — Attraction in Sandy

I've waited a few weeks to write the review so I could process everything and try to be fair. For one thing, this was our first escape room so I didn't know if we were frustrated with THIS escape room or if we were frustrated with the escape room process in general. Also, we were grouped with a couple people that said they'd done MANY escape rooms and knew what they were doing so we kind of heeded their advice and it's on us that it wasn't good advice, not on Enigma. Just a heads up for others: don't collect everything anyone finds in one spot because if they ask where each clue was found, it's hard to know. Also, saying yes to getting a clue only slightly helped us so we should have said yes to that MUCH sooner. We did the 451 room. The good: I liked the premise of sneaking books in a society where they're banned. I liked figuring out the furniture, although some of it we figured out wrong and because of that, there were some things, we over-thought when we should have moved on. I even liked the propaganda posters on the wall that added to the experience. Once we got to the second room, I loved the change of scenery. I loved the setting-I thought it was done really well. The employees were kind. When it was over, an employee offered to take pictures if we wanted. Also, the price was much better than other escape rooms. THE DOWN SIDE: The door code was pretty tricky for us. We were on the right track but for some reason, finally nailing it took longer than we had hoped it would. The clues got us close but we had to take a stretch to solve that. There was construction and some broken parts of the room and that seemed a little weird. Mostly, it was SO hot!!! Could we not have air conditioning? Temperature-wise, we were quite miserable! Also, some of the pieces of the puzzle just didn't seem cohesive. It was hard to figure out why some things were done how they were. Even with the explanations later, there was a lot that didn't make sense to me as to how it all fit together and I've read the book and had a decent grasp of the back story. Also, it wasn't until they let us out that we found out it's a 10-15% success rate on the room. If I had known that sooner, I'm not sure I would have picked that for our first room and also, I wouldn't have felt so frustrated when I couldn't figure things out better. I just wish there were more disclosure about that upfront. OVERALL: my sons felt like it didn't make sense to them but they still had fun. Now that we've dipped our feet in an escape room, we would better know how to approach the next one. The price is good. I hope air conditioning works better for other groups that go there. Hopefully, this is a fair assessment. :) UPDATE: Even with the troubles we experienced, management took the time to listen to our concerns and turn this into a great experience overall. I look forward to trying some of the other rooms to see what...

We did two rooms- 451 and Hexed. We had a group of four with roughly 170 rooms experience between us.

The set: was thematic and immersive. Hexed felt a little cluttered but it fit with the theme. Some of the puzzles were incorporated into the set, which I always enjoy.

The game masters: were friendly and pleasant- sometimes slow (1-2 minutes) to give hints even when prompted multiple times in one instance, but overall great.

The puzzles: relied largely on a search and find dynamic for portions of the room. This was one of the major pitfalls of the rooms for me, but it’s not an uncommon method even though I don’t find it personally enjoyable, so take that as you will. We found pieces we didn’t need until much later on, couldn’t find all the pieces we needed, and one piece wasn’t able to be found by even the game master. In my opinion, if you need pieces that are either not included in the room or cannot be found or at least hinted at for location and have to rely on the game master to generate the information independently—the room should not be available to play. We had one broken puzzle in 451 and one puzzle, also in 451, that we had right, but did not solve even when we had everything correct— which came off as poorly designed.

Overall: it’s easy to tell that the rooms were designed with passion and meticulous attention to detail, but could have used some honest and thorough beta testing. The custom puzzles are fun and add a level of immersion to the room, but a few stretches in logic, that likely only make true sense to their creator, may be needed to complete certain puzzles. We got through 80% of the rooms in both games in the first half hour or so, and would get stuck trying to make one or two puzzles work for the remainder. A few small conscious tweaks to design choices to particular puzzles would make all the difference for me in being able to enjoy these rooms. As is, I left feeling as though there was unmet potential for both. If you have a large group the search and find portions of the rooms should pass without...

Booked the 451 room with my family with whom I do escape rooms fairly often. This was the worst all around experience we've had in one. Online, they claim the room has a 30% success rate, but since reopening the room 2 weeks ago they have had nobody escape.

I now understand why. Before entering, the game master admitted to not knowing much about the room saying "I know as much about this room as you", and it showed. Fairly early into the experience we had a clue almost correct, but with one slight mistake. Instead of giving us one simple hint that would've cleared up our mistake, the game master gave us the same hint 3 times which aligned to what we had already been doing. Because of this we spent 25 minutes messing with this one clue and ran out of time before getting to experience much of the room.

My frustration is that when the game master came to let us out and we explained our confusion with the clue, they go "oh, I heard you saying that, but was confused because I didn't realize the clue said that". Then when asked about our experience, I voiced that a clearer hint would've showed us our simple mistake and allowed us to move on and make it at least much farther in the room. Their response to me was "well that's a hard room huh? Have you tried our easiest room?"

I'm not necessarily upset with the staff, but it's frustrating that the staff hasn't been trained on a room well enough to be able to give a hint on a very minor mistake we had. Along with this, the room wasn't as much challenging as it was unclear. For example things that are typically marked in other escape rooms like number of digits required for a code or number of attempts you get before you are locked out were nowhere to be found.

Afterwards, I read through older reviews before they redid this game, and while it seems to be improved from that. They still need to make sure their staff knows the game well enough to give useful hints and give more information for what to do once a...