101 Escape Rooms — Attraction in Westlake Village

I don’t usually review, but I’ve been to around 40 escape rooms all across the country, and I have never been so greatly disappointed by a room of this price point. We did the Starship Libra room yesterday, and here is the review I wish I could have read before wasting my and my 7 friend’s money:

Presentation: This room looked a bit like a science fair project. It was predominantly put together with duck tape that was quite visible. There were video files that would play when pushing buttons after a weird glitchy period of the computer monitors changing tabs, but they were so quiet no one could make out what they were saying.

Puzzles: I wish I were exaggerating when I say there were more red herrings in this room than puzzles. Any time you felt like you were “onto something” it was almost definitely a red herring, as most of the actual solutions were just spelled out somewhere and needing to be plugged in somewhere else. There was pretty much nothing of interest puzzle wise.

There were, however, some really fun SEEMING puzzles that weren’t actually puzzles. When you have lit buttons that turn on and off when you push different buttons in a clear pattern in an escape room, things like that just can’t be a red herring. I think all of us spent time trying to “solve” it, when it was literally just lights programmed that way for who knows why. After the fourth time working on a cool puzzle like that just to learn that (like every other “puzzle”) you just needed to find a number written somewhere and plug it into the lock, it gets a little frustrating.

There were some red herrings so thorough that a whole lock being removed wouldn’t even really do anything for you. We left the room with a lock still on, and another lock had only unlocked a switch to turn on a light for whatever was inside the lock that stayed locked. I asked one of the room hosts about it and she just shrugged.

Theme: There was ALOT of missed opportunity theme wise. As said before, the puzzles were lacking, but they also didn’t tie together whatsoever and otherwise were just incoherent to any kind of… anything. It was just finding things. This could have had any theme and been equally bad, but the potential of a space room made it especially disappointing. There were pretty much no tech-based puzzles, most came down to directional, digit, and key based locks. For a theme with so much inherent tech potential, this was underwhelming.

Hints: We got two. Both hints were effective in that both times they accurately told us that we just needed to look in a random area to find something, because the answer/key was just kinda sitting there and we’d been so busy trying to solve puzzles that the room didn’t have to find it.

TLDR: More red herring puzzles then actual puzzles, scrappily put together room, and more of a game of just searching for things then solving anything. Save your money, do a...

Not a very good escape room. Too many cumulative clues all happening at the same time. Was very confusing to say the least. Only one room too so everyone tripping over each other (and we were only 4 people) finding different clues in unison, a jumble of letters and numbers not sure what to use where. Ended up being able to solve with a little help being needed because of all the confusion, and despite missing 2 or 3 different clues never being solved. That shouldn’t happen in an escape room. We’ve done a few escape rooms at different places, and they’re usually a bit more professional and experiential and ‘much more linear. Very dark too until we started clicking all the buttons on the board and found a strip of LED lights that gave us some light and a sigh of relief that we could finally see. This place was being run by 4 or 5 teenagers when we were there, who were all polite but not the experience we were expecting especially for almost $40 per person. Most escape rooms take your picture at the end for a lasting memory, this place the bunch of kids running it were all hanging out in the camera room (with the door open for us to see in) mostly ignoring us until we left. We did not enjoy it, and it’s unfortunate because we were there for my son’s birthday. We asked if we could get a discount if we do a second one because it was my sons birthday and we wanted a better experience and one of the teens answered “sorry we’re already the cheapest escape rooms in the area so we don’t do that”. Great, didn’t make a big deal about it, just left. No photo offered. Recommendation is to go somewhere else for your escape room experience. There are good escape room businesses in Reseda and Downtown LA we have done. Find those...

We did corkscrewed and crematorium. I feel as if this location has weaker themeing than the thousand oaks location. The puzzles themselves are good, but the size of crematorium makes it seem a bit small and uncomplicated. The rooms just dont feel like im in a crematorium. It has a decent room transition, but the 2 rooms are very small. We finished it in about 35 minutes so it never got hot for us. 5/10

Corkscrewed is pretty cool, much better than crematorium. The first key made me feel a bit let down in how it is hidden, and a few broken props still had their remainders left( like solid glue in a random spot), but other than that it felt rewarding. Plenty of mechanical triggers and a really cool unconventional puzzle in a bottle. 7/10

As a side note, we have done 2 puzzles at the TO mall location. And feel the builder has gotten much better as he goes. We still enjoyed our time here and will eventually do the rest of the rooms here I'm sure. A little clean up would go along way.

As an aside the owner is usually on site and is very easy to talk to. You can tell how proud he is of his puzzles. You won't regret coming here...