Puzzle Room Tahoe — Attraction in South Lake Tahoe

I don't know how this escape room has gotten so many high reviews. I can only imagine that it's from people who have never been to an escape room before and so have no idea what goes into a good one.

To begin with, you're going to have a hard time finding this escape room. It's located inside a casino, which would be fine, except that the escape room's website does not give you a map or detailed instructions to find them, and you won't find signs for them inside the casino. Several casino workers and vendors had no idea who they were, so it was only through significant wandering that we found them. Not a good start.

The second thing you'll notice is that they don't even have a proper entrance/lobby/waiting area/etc... You will go down a short flight of stairs, and the small platform at the base of the stairs is it. As in, that's all there is to their storefront.

Going into the escape room itself, the room might look good from a distance, but the fit and finish is extremely poor. The quality of workmanship is poor. The puzzles are really simple, offering next to no challenge whatsoever. If you finish a room with more than 50% of the time left, you got robbed, because they did not give the room enough substance. Speaking of which, there was only one room in the theme we were in. Meaning what you see when they walk you in - that's everything. Nothing else, no mystery, no additional areas to unlock, nothing.

When we finished the last "puzzle", the game was over and we were there saying "Wait, that's it?". The game master didn't offer congratulations, didn't ask what we thought of the room, nothing.

Puzzle Room Tahoe has a really nice image they use for their Google Maps listing that makes them seem like they're really going to be something special. But apparently, that is just marketing and nothing else.

The only positive thing I can say about them is that they are not one of those escape rooms made up of nothing but combination locks - they had a few, but they did have puzzles that worked on other principles. And that is the only positive thing I can...

We had a large group and the first puzzle we needed to solve was how to book the room. I didn't want to book online because I wasn't sure if we would have 10 or 12 and didn't want to lose money paying for people if they couldn't come. I sent one email with questions and received a prompt reply - however after calling the number in the response the person who answered did not work for Puzzles! I thought maybe it was a typo in the email but the same telephone number was given three times. After a dozen emails and phone calls with several different people we finally were able to book with only a small deposit (

Have done a lot of escape rooms. This wasn't one of my favorites. Game introduction that explained the rules was an AI generated video with stilted, choppy speech. Very weird and uncanny. First two puzzles were done immediately, then while looking around I believe the magnet on another puzzle failed when I brushed my fingers over it and a clue just kind of fell into my hands without the puzzle being solved at all. Radioed our game host to try and get confirmation that I hadn't broken anything and she said the magnet had just failed, so we got a clue without ever solving the puzzle, which is a bummer. Moved on to another puzzle that required counting the number of seconds a very small light was visible and after multiple tries of both my boyfriend and I looking at it, we just couldn't tell if it was 2 or 3 seconds. So we asked for a hint and the host said giving us a hint would just give us the answer, so we said alright fine and moved on. Felt poorly designed and could have been better achieved with a less ambiguous code style. Solved another puzzle and then while looking around my boyfriend set off a second faulty magnet which ended up being the end of the game. When the host came in I asked her if we had actually done everything because it seemed like a lot of clues hadn't been used at all and she didn't seem to know for sure but kind of just handwaved the whole thing. So in total we had a couple of generic puzzles, one poorly designed one, and two that broke before we solved them. Not a great...