Breakout Auckland — Local services in Howick

Identify was our second room after a disappointment from the opening weekend. You are about to solve a murder of a friend of yours, but that does not actually relate to the room. The story integrity is not crucial for me though. I am generally skeptical about franchises, which was a second reason for our low expectations. And yet, they could not meet even that.

I usually complain when everything runs in a sequence as that gives little use of a team, but vast majority of this room runs in parallel. That could be great, but once you get stuck, you get stuck with ALL the puzzles, not just one. We had to collect 9 frames and we got stuck after 6th. Which meant we had to ask for 3 consecutive clues as each of them just gave us another frame.

The room is full of padlocks (thankfully only one or two of each type, so you don't have to frantically try the combination many times). Majority of clues is written somewhere. The only puzzles I liked were related to MP3 player(s) - those showed depth.

Some puzzles were badly designed, like when we locked ourselves out from a security safe for 5 minutes, and as it contained the last frame, we could only sit on a sofa and wait. Luckily the staff member walked in and opened the lock for us (by the way she was the most positive thing about this room). I believe there has to be a safe that doesn't lock itself out for that long. The last puzzle is to organize the frames correctly. You don't know what is the correct permutation, and assuming that there is only one, it makes the puzzle badly designed as well (as you don't get any hints).

I was also sad about the manager's communication, who had promised us a free room, but then she suddenly stopped replying. It was a free one though, so no hard feelings.

As we weren't happy with the first room, we wanted to give them a second chance. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Breakout to anyone. It is one of the worst escape room venues I know of.

FIRST REVIEW: They have first opened a day before our visit, and we tried the Sabotage room, which should be the most difficult. It was full of padlocks and codes and the owners didn't invest much into the room. While getting hints via a screen works ok at other places, it didn't work well for us. Hopefully this will be ironed out once staff gets more experienced and will be able to track visitors better. We have done dozens of rooms before, so there was nothing surprising or innovative. Average cheap franchise experience. We unfortunately won't come back to...

I was really disappointed with the room I did at Breakout. I have done a lot of escape rooms and this was by far my least favourite. It didn't get off to a great start when staff mistakenly left a padlock in the room unlocked. The room lacked creativity and the puzzles I have come to expect from escape rooms. This room was just full of padlocks to unlock, which was tedious. I also didn't like that the room didn't flow. Each padlock that was opened felt like it led to a dead end, so you always felt like you were back at square one. There was also some very specific prior knowledge you would need to solve one of the stages of the room without a hint. There was no clue in the room to help with this. And the final stage of the room could only be solved by trial and error. I would have liked to see a cryptic clue or something to solve that rather than playing a guessing game. Unfortunately I can't think of anything positive to say about the room and in my opinion, it needs a lot of work to bring it up to scratch. It felt like it was thrown together to cash in on the popularity of...

Can't say I was too impressed with our experience today. We had a booking at 1:45pm. We were told to wait 5 minutes because the room was being set up. Asked again after 10 minutes, then we're told to wait another 10-15 minutes. By the time we entered the room, it had been 30 minutes. The room we had was underwhelming. The clues we had were run down, and nothing made any sense, and it didn't feel like anything connected. We even asked for clues, and those weren't helpful at all. I can collectively say the entire group left feeling a bit defeated and underwhelmed at the experience. To top it all off, the customer service was lacking. They were either talking to each other or there was no communication with us. At one point, we rang the clue bell multiple times, and no one came in or gave a clue on the screen. We decided to leave and when we approached the front desk there was no one there. Instead of waiting to find out how the room finishes we left, not knowing. If you want a better escape room experience, maybe try...