The Ultimate Escape Rooms — Attraction in Solvang

I did the gold rush room with a group of 6. I don't want to be mean, but this was honestly the worst room I've done out of the 13 total. I write this because I wish I had seen negative reviews for this before I went and paid. I do NOT recommend Ultimate Escape Rooms due to the expense, lack of content/puzzles in the room, and general disregard for the player experience. If interested, see recommendations below.

The price needs to be per person, not per room, especially because gold rush should really be a 2-4 person room. For us it was $195, so with 5 people it costs about $39 each. Most escape rooms are around $30 per person and have MUCH more content and give everyone stuff to do simultaneously, unlike the linear nature of Gold Rush.

I would recommend to move the host/hint area to the side room. The hosts should not be giving hints and showing the room's camera screens in the waiting area. While we were in the waiting room, the host was directing a game at the front desk. From the sitting area, we could see all the live camera screens of the people doing the Gold Rush room before us, as well as hear the host giving them clues, thus the end puzzle/flavor text was partially spoiled for us. This seems unnecessary as another employee seemed to peep out from an office room to the side.

The host did not seem happy to be working there. We were all very smiley and excited to play the room, so I don't think we offended him. He talked to us in a "dead inside" sort of way until reading the room's prompt. He then switched to a cowboy voice. He switched so abruptly it felt almost fake or ironic. He mostly read off the paper in front of him and when he looked up, he did not look us in the eye, like he was just trying to get it over with.

The Gold Rush room needs more puzzles and to not be linear, so that people have stuff to do. We ended up just standing next to our friends as they worked on a lock or read from paper that we couldn't get close enough to help. The biggest gripe is the room has a lot of potential that isn't used. There are so many cool props that could be further puzzles, but out of everything you start with in the room, only 2, just 2, things are used. Seems like it's designed to waste time and make the puzzle room feel longer. I recommended streamlining the props used, so that players can spend more time on figuring out complex puzzles rather than picking up and testing out each action that could be taken on each decoration. We wasted about 15 minutes before using the first clue, then finished the room with 20 minutes to spare still. We shouldn't be able to move through all the puzzles in only 35 minutes after wasting 15 minutes.

It felt like this was a money grab more than a cool place to do puzzles/creative thinking with...

Friendly staff, nice location. For our trip their AC had been out for a week and the rooms were upstairs. They did their best with fans but it was a little rough.

As for the rooms, we did Mystery at the Big Top and Gold Fever. These were rooms #116 and #117 for my wife and I, who did these alone together.

Big Top is a mess of a room. They'll say it's their hardest with a 30% success rate, but mostly this is caused by many of the games/contraptions not being functional or a complete lack of guidance for the players to make probable connections. We were told we could just "use a hint" to completely skip over a game that was finicky. We had to unplug a machine that wasn't paying out despite us solving the puzzle, so the door would unlock. There were also instances where loose props/puzzles were expected to be kept in place so you knew where they were taken from else you could screw yourself out of knowing what clue info was associated. Even had we made it to the finish, we would have been forced to manhandle a massive chain through wooden doors which we watched the game master struggle with himself for a few minutes when showing us.

A room should never be constructed in a way that players can screw themselves or lock themselves out of completion. Items should be clearly defined so that if taken elsewhere it's clear how and what they are connected to. And obviously it's no fun if a game master has to continually provide hints or advise to ignore or skip things or say, "oh by the way this doesn't work or this is missing but it said this" etc.

Gold Fever was considerable better overall, which we completed in 38 minutes. There were still some issues where an item was stuck way too far behind where we needed to get it, a weighted puzzle that we had to carefully manually trigger as it is finicky and doesn't always work on it's own, and a final puzzle that required the game master to advise exactly what to do and what not to do else you would make it physically impossible to solve (which to be fair it's a neat little trick but...figure out how to make so people don't need such guidance and can't make a...

We had fun as a large group, 11 of us, here but I was disappointed with the room (gold rush). I've done a few "rooms" at other places and this place was actually just a single room, maybe that's common but everyplace else I've gone was much larger and multiple rooms to access on each adventure. We called ahead and confirmed that it was big enough for all 11 to do at once but it just wasn't. In a single room escape the max I would recommend would be 6 people. We should have split up into two rooms, which they did offer. So our fault.

The puzzles were just not as interesting or fun to solve as others I've done. Directions given at the intro were not very complete and some of the clues and mechanisms didn't function well. We got out in less than half an hour due to a few of these issues so they graciously gave us a voucher to go back and do another...