5 Wits West Nyack — Attraction in Town of Clarkstown

Escape rooms with more of a multi-media experience: sounds, lights, projections, animatronics. If you like playing escape room type games on your mobile/game-systems this does come closer to recreating actually being inside one of those games than your standard escape room. But there are issues:

First downside: Not isolated to 5-wits, but a common problem with many escape rooms. The staff who "introduce" the room do it half-heartedly, which seem to take away from the immersive experience rather than add to it. I know they give the pitch many times a day, but we are all paying customers. The one saving grace here is that there is an additional multimedia intro that gives you the story line.

Second downside: There seems to be substantially fewer puzzles to solve. Each adventure is divided into 3 rooms, each having 2-3 things to solve. On average the puzzles are easier to solve than what you would find in a typical escape room. More complicated puzzles are mostly due to the fact that you have to interact with the multi-media in an unintuitive way.

Third downside: Instructions are given multiple times in each room over speakers. The speakers are very muddy and there is no way to have them replay. They do not get your attention prior to speaking so it is quite frustrating when you can't hear everything they tell you.

Final issue: There is a 35-40 minute enforced time limit on the rooms due to scheduling. Some of the puzzles are designed that they will start giving you hints you didn't ask for. This both lessens your score and fun-factor because you didn't get the satisfaction solving on your own. In Drago's Castle, we finished the experience in less than 30 minutes, but it gave us clues for a puzzle in the second room that we didn't want or need. I would have rather finished in our 35 (or whatever the maximum time was) and been given the extra 2-3 minutes we needed to finish solving the puzzle.

Apart from those issues, the experience is novel and mostly fun. We went on a discount day where you can purchase all 3 rooms for $36 ($12/room). This is the way to do it. Not only will you feel that this price is fair for the experience, but only doing one room will feel like the experience is over too quickly. Scheduling all 3 rooms together makes you get into the mindset and feel you really had more of a substantial visit.

We had one more specific issue in our final room, The Tomb:

We had two malfunctions with the puzzles. I won't disclose any details here, so as not to ruin the fun. The first (in first room) we were made to wait 2-3 extra minutes. I even opened the emergency door to call out to staff that there was a problem, but no-one responded (everything is fully automated - they don't even seem to be monitoring rooms for people requesting assistance). The second issue (in second room), the puzzle would not register as solved even though it was solved it properly.

After the experience I went to one of the employees at the front desk and very nicely informed him of the issues and tried to validate with him that we had done everything properly. He seemed to concur that we solved everything appropriately based on my descriptions. While he didn't act like he disbelieved what I said, he really didn't engage me at all, instead staring into a computer screen perhaps trying to determine how what I explained happened. He didn't offer any semblance of an apology (no, "Oh, I'm sorry about that"), nor did he even thank me for bringing the issue to their attention. In fact after standing there for an additional 10-20 seconds with no feedback, I just said again "anyway, just wanted you to know there were some issues", and walked away - still with no type of response from the employee.

I attributed this more to him being young and not knowing proper customer service skills, rather then being straight out rude, but still something they should be working on. The problems definitely frustrated us in the game, and certainly impacted our time and score (not that we were really competing...

EDIT: I did the medieval one later after I'd written the review and I'd like to rehash the whole thing.

**The only one of their three rooms which I did not participate in was the space one, so this review pertains to the egypt one and medival one.

Overall: Pros: -Immersion, -Age Accessibility, -Variety, -Price

Cons: -Fairly easy difficulty, -Rooms are short individually, which is not a big problem when doing multiple, but may leave you dissatisfied if you only do one room, -Far from a traditional escape room experience, which may turn off people expecting otherwise.

If you're looking for a typical escape room experience that really puts your critical thinking skills to the test, these do not quite fill the role. The rooms are fairly short, and the puzzles are not super challenging. Rather than booking an hour and being kept to a few rooms to escape, there's a queue system, and a forced time system. You're encouraged to go as fast as possible, with the rooms only taking around 30-40 minutes. You're given a score based on your performance at the end.

The difficulty of the rooms, while not as intensive as a normal escape room, is acceptable, as it opens the doors for all ages to be able to participate.

The Egypt room doesn't provide too many traditional puzzles, and the ones it does provide are not particularly challenging. The Egypt room's challenges are moreso active tasks that require coordination and teamwork to accomplish. For example, one of the chambers of the tomb entails several vases that light up, and require participants to hit the vase which was the last to light up. The solution is there, but the challenge comes from coordinating with your teammates in order to properly choose the vase, as there's no way to look at all of them at once due to their placement.

The Medieval room was closer to the traditional escape room experience. While it did have its fair share of active tasks like the Egypt room, there were a lot more traditional thought based puzzles. Not nearly as many as a normal escape room by any means, but I appreciated the puzzles after doing egypt which had relatively few.

While people more adjusted to regular escape rooms may find the challenges of these rooms not particularly difficult, the presentation of each is a very welcome aspect. Each room is made to feel as immersive as possible, and with full voice acting, video clips, and a story to each. While a traditional room will leave you with hints on a television screen, hints and objectives are delivered to you with a variety of fully voice acted clips from the character of the respective room's story.

The price is also something that can't be ignored. While the two rooms that I've done were not particularly difficult, there's a deal when buying multiple tickets for rooms at once. 2 Rooms come out to $29.99, which is right around the price of a typical escape room experience. 3 Rooms at $34.99, a little more expensive, but not much. Overall, you're getting 3 different experiences, stories, and puzzle sets for only around $6 or so more expensive than a typical escape room experience, which is a very fair price considering the production value...

I visited 5 Wits with my husband, two sisters, daughter, and daughter's friend (both 20 years old) last weekend. A few of us had previously visited the location in Foxboro, Massachusetts which has since closed, and done the 20,000 Leagues adventure. That experience was truly incredible, with six fully-themed areas and a live guide that accompanied us. The Palisades Center experience was a step down from that, but still very enjoyable. We planned to do the Tomb and Dragon adventures, and ended up staying for the Space one as well, so we did all three. It ended up costing about $60 per person. The 5 Wits room designers have the same challenge that all Escape Room-type establishments have -- the puzzles have to be challenging and fun for kids and adults, and thrilling without being too scary. I was initially apprehensive about the Tomb room, because I tend to be easily freaked out, but I felt silly afterward for worrying about it. These rooms would only be scary for young children--- adults will have no problem. There are no jump scares, only occasional moments in darkness. All three rooms were beautifully themed, with standout moments in each. A few nicely-placed pop culture references had my daughter and I laughing with delight. Our group of six adults did not have too much trouble with any of the puzzles. I tended to prefer the puzzles that involved thinking over ones that required memory or precise button-pushing (Several in the Tomb and Spaceship especially could be very frustrating for groups with a lot of children.) If I had to pick a favorite it would be the Dragon Castle one-- the puzzles in that one were the most enjoyable and the finale was the most satisfying. The down side is that these adventures don't last long-- we finished each one in 25 to 35 minutes. You get a number score of your group's performance (in the hopes you'll come back to try to beat your score?) but a lot of the score comes from completing the rooms quickly. While the rooms were fun and there were some nice special effects, I personally did not get the same adrenaline rush and sense of satisfaction that I have from some of the better designed escape rooms I've done. 5 Wits is quick to point out that their rooms are not "Escape Rooms" but fun adventures that involve puzzles and challenges. I think most hard-core escape room fans love the "a-ha" moment of figuring out a puzzle and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with that. 5 Wits was a little lacking in that department but made up for it with excellent theming and nice employees (special shout-out to Elle, whose upbeat personality was a delight). I would be interested to know if any of the rooms have difficulty settings that can be changed depending on the party's size and/or ability (mostly adults vs mostly children). All in all it was a fun day, we made memories, and the Palisades Center Mall is a great place to visit (we drove up from the Philadelphia area). Thank you 5 Wits for your unique brand of...