Escape the Mystery Room — Attraction in Town of Wallkill

By far the worst room I’ve ever done and I’m an avid escaper. This place has zero organization, no linear or clear and concise clues, no cameras, the hint system was someone walking into the room and not pausing time, and ask what you did so far, then takes the packet from the door to see what the next step is because they aren’t trained. They are also 50 minutes instead of an hour, and still the SLOWEST 50 minutes I’ve ever experienced. If a room feels slow, that’s a red flag. Also the room walls are makeshift walls and don’t go all the way to the ceiling so you hear everyone from the other rooms. The employee (I can’t even call her a game master since she had to read what to do next) told me there’s red herring clues in the room and if you’re stuck to move on…I never found one clue that WASN’T a red herring… and when I asked her about the ten pieces of paper in a locker, she said oh let me check, pulls out the booklet on what comes next and says, there’s this also…and struggles herself to pull out a magnetic case behind the locking part of the locker, that holds a key. So all of the paperwork was NOTHING. I tried adding all the numbers on a paper pictured with a calculator together and tried all the results in EVERY LOCK, easily ten locks and nothing. Total waste of money and time. And the best part was that she insulted me afterwards saying she should’ve gave me an easier room…I’ve escaped easily 30 rooms ALONE with escape rates as low as 10 percent. This company was AWFUL. Also when you call to book a room you get ANOTHER COUNTRY. Worst experience. Don’t...

The reason I'm giving Sherlock's Library one star: I've been through about 30 of these escape rooms (some amazing Sherlock themed ones), and although we did win this one after 2(+1) hints, it just wasn't super enjoyable.

A room doesn't have to be technologically advanced to be good, but this felt lazy. The paper props upon flipping them over had perforated edges that somebody didn't even try to follow. The 'library' room didn't have any books, it was just wallpaper. It was advertised as Sherlock's library but we ended up in some guy's office? After 30 of these, puzzles tend to make sense. One puzzle, which I won't spoil, did not make any sense at all. The puzzles were all paper based, so you could have essentially done this online. It was also a bummer that you had to use a key card to escape the room because it wasn't on theme at all. Also, I appreciate a good misdirect, but the number of misdirects in here was not in the nature of a fun game.

The staff was very nice, but gave an extra hint when we didn't want it and told us we were doing a "great job" when we spent 20 minutes unable to solve the first puzzle. We literally did nothing.

I would suggest a full revamp of Sherlock's Library before offering it again...

We booked a party for my 9 year old’s birthday. It seemed disorganized. I was told on the phone the kids would eat first and then play which made sense as it was an afternoon party, but when we arrived it was the reverse. The employees made one of the adults in our group read a list of rules to the kids instead of going over the rules with the kids themselves, which I thought was strange. Then there was a very brief “lock tutorial” which was confusing for this age group, none of them have had experience with these types of combination locks. The escape room experience was fine, but they were really struggling and it seemed for this age group maybe a few extra hints would have been appropriate. At one point a few of the kids even became so bored they decided to exit the room. During the party portion after the escape experience, the staff was nonexistent. They dropped off pizza, but that was it. At one point when we needed something, the front desk had been left completely unattended. After about 15 minutes of searching for an employee, someone in our group knocked on a break room door to find all the staff seemingly on break together. My daughter had a good time, but I was not impressed with the...