Trapped Toledo — Attraction in Toledo

To preface, our group of four was paired with another group of four and did their Mutated 3. The other group had no major impact on this review.

Out of about 50 escape rooms, this is near the bottom of the barrel.

Cons: Arrogance: Yes this was so bad that it gets a spot on this review. Nearly all the workers, especially the in-game leader were very arrogant to the point of actually being offensive. Trapped Toledo seems to pride itself with having actors, but having them be pushy and condescending takes away from the whole experience. Our group and I assume the other group felt uncomfortable each and every time our leader spoke. Korey, our front is included in this. This was not in-character arrogance and rudeness. If it was, then what a horrible choice of characters.

Puzzle Design: Actually this wasn't entirely terrible, but some things were flawed. Having 2 groups of 4 in this escape room was a bit much. While I greatly dislike the fact that Trapped Toledo pairs you with other groups, it seems like they only do so for the money. There is no reason to fit 8 people in 1 single room that is roughly 400sq ft with a zombie anchored to a corner. The playable area becomes smaller and smaller as the game goes on which makes it even tighter. The zombie adds little to the experience short of some jumpscares while being incredibly distracting and confining us to a small area to work with.

Puzzle Design 2: Many many printouts. It's fortunate that the theme was science-y but maybe dial it back a bit. Reading long papers while having to deal with the zombie became annoying and distracting rather than clever and fun. Also, spending a few pennies to reprint and laminate your papers would be nice.

Puzzle Design 3: Having 2 random groups join together also naturally discourages communication. Whether it's unfamiliarity, shyness, anxiety, etc, there are valid reasons why this ''grouping with random" is a poor gameplay choice. I felt our group did puzzles mostly amongst ourselves and the other group did theirs. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I missed out of about half the room because I couldn't see the puzzle or because it was too crowded. Having 8 people crowd around a single sheet of paper in the corner of the room was simply not fun.

Puzzle Design 4: Having a ''timeout period on puzzles is absurdly stupid". Some escape rooms will claim they don't want you to try every single combination. To that, why do they not make a better puzzle? And inherently, what's wrong with trying all 12 combinations when the solution is non-trivial and not obvious. Trying to mask that fact with a the line, 'It's part of the challenge' is a lazy and frankly cheap excuse. There are other techonologies out there that are better and more reliable.

Puzzle Design 5: The timer only updates every minute. Weird, but not terrible. What was bad was the monitor the timer was on was in a dangerous and zombie-filled area of the room with small font. The timer also disappears when the loud siren goes off, also an inconvenience.

Puzzle Design 6: Speaking of loud... Having an audio recording play in a low volume during the siren alarm seems flawed. We had no idea there was audio when we solved a puzzle. Frankly, we weren't even sure we had solved it in the first place because there wasnt sufficiently notable feedback from the puzzle.

Actors: We felt the leader was both too heavily invested in his role and not adaptive to his environments. As the room went on, he became apathetic and perhaps bored from observation. This ontop of the arrogance made for possible the worst non-lethal escape room addition ever. Perhaps he was having a bad day, but would not recommend.

DLC: Trapped Toledo offers downloadable content. For the price of $5/bullet, you can obtain a toy gun and shoot the zombie, incapacitating it for 1 whole minute. That's $25 for 5 minutes of quiet free roam time. Why not just have the weapons as part of the room for free? Or get rid of the altogether and give the zombie a new job.

Pros:Clean 1 room. Reache character...

I have traveled all over the world doing escape rooms with my team. This was probably the worst experience we have ever had. All mamangement cares about is profits, and they ruin the game to get it. We did two rooms, their mutated and pinched.

Honestly the puzzles werent bad, and the staff (when outside of character) were quite friendly. When in to character they really got into it and that was pretty amusing. Aside from that the experience was horrible.

These rooms were already the most expensive rooms I have ever done, however since they have live actors it makes a little sense. However as soon as you get there they start offering to sell you guns and perks for more money to make the game a little easier. Then in pinched, they stuck our group of 4 with another group of 5 making 9 total in one tiny room. Just a money grab that completely ruined the experience. The other team got so annoyed by how cramped it was that they left early. I hope they got a refund but with how cheap the owner appears to be its unlikely.

Honestly solving the puzzles would have been a lot easier without the actors. In many instances they were dropping hints that were helpful but not really desired, but that was not too bad. In a few instances they actually got in the way and argued with us just to slow us down. All part of the experience I guess.

The props were all quite cheap, which if it hadnt been for how much of a money grab this was, would of been acceptable, but in this instance it was just another annoyance.

Overall would not return. I have done over 200 escape rooms accross the world and this is the first time I am actually saying I would not go back. Needs new owners and to stop trying to scrape every penny...

Very meh for an escape room. We overall had fun but this was the worst run place I’ve been to. We drove down from Ann Arbor to meet friends here and got stuck in traffic with a highway accident and were 10 minutes late. They were super nasty about this and gave us an inappropriate amount of attitude. We were told that there was another group behind us so they started the clock taking 15 minutes off our time. After it was done we went to the ice cream place next door for an hour and no one was behind us so we were lied to, very disappointing for the amount of money spent. I understand we were late and that’s not the business’s fault but still have some grace and customer service. Additionally the game “Buried” was not the best run, the staff member helping us seemed bored out of her mind and was giving the bare minimum of hints even though we asked for extra help do to our shortage of time. There are much better run escape...