The Great Escape Room Challenge — Local services in Cherry Hill Township

I was initially not going to leave a review, but given that I have found several other reviews with similar concerns I felt it was important to speak up.

From a game design perspective, Murder Mystery is really not a well designed room. It seems to be one of the newer ones, but the props in the room are already falling apart. Books and laminates were peeling and things that were supposed to be glued down were loose. There are 5 identical safes, why would you take the time to duplicate something mundane instead of having something more interesting open? Most of the puzzles were laminates which feels outdated and like wasted opportunities for better gameplay. The puzzles were mostly getting codes to put into keypads, the escape room was pretty low tech for being new. There are multiple 3 digit code puzzles that just do not give you the order of the numbers, so you just have to trial and error them which is annoying. There was handwritten UV markings that were bleeding and faded which made them incredibly difficult to work with. Also, without spoiling anything there is another UV puzzle that requires you to look at a puzzle piece you’ve already used with NO indication that you should return to it. It just felt sloppy from a gameplay perspective. The room was pretty linear, but the puzzles didn’t flow well and the connections just weren’t there. From listening to the staff talk, it really feels like these puzzles are designed to require clues which is not good or challenging gameplay. Most of the puzzles didn’t feel gratifying when we solved them either, the solutions weren’t satisfying it was just even more frustrating that the puzzle was so lackluster. I have had a lot of experience with escape rooms and this room was really disappointing and simply not fun to play. Another review mentions that the game master was boasting that “only 1 group escaped in the 60 minutes.” No one escaping doesn’t necessarily mean your room is good or challenging, it’s usually an indicator that the puzzles don’t work. If the majority of the groups are unable to solve the puzzles without help, that means there isn’t enough information for the puzzle to be solvable. Also pretty poor customer service, the game masters do not offer to answer questions or explain anything to you, they don’t even tell you how far you got unless you push to know. It was one of the most lackluster outros I’ve ever received and it really seems the game masters don’t know the rooms that well. From my understanding, this room was designed in house. Maybe their other rooms are better, this one was a major miss for me.

Also, I’d highly recommend checking out the escape room review app Morty, this room has entirely negative reviews there...

Me and a couple friends came to do the murder mystery room for my birthday. I was super excited because I’ve done a good amount of escape rooms and was up for a bit of a challenge. We were fully aware that this room is pretty difficult. That being said, I was extremely dissatisfied leaving here. The game master basically mocked us for the entire experience through the messages on the screen. All of the props that were supposed to be glued down were able to be moved freely, so we had no idea what we could and could not touch, which made things even more difficult to understand. The puzzles we did complete had to be solved by clues from our game master because there was nothing in the room that told us how to do it. They kinda just gave us a bunch of stuff and basically said “idk figure it out!”. It was pretty obvious that they don’t update their props consistently as most things were pretty worn down. We were also expecting way more from the room aesthetically, as the only evidence of the “murder” was a fake corpse covered by a sheet. Besides that it was just a normal “house-like” room. Also, towards the end a random guy in a panda costume came in? It wasted a full 5 minutes of our time and we were pretty confused by it. One of the many numbered boxes was left open by accident, which isn’t a huge deal to us, however, later on when we completed a puzzle, two of the boxes opened and we had no idea until we attempted to open them. There was no indication that the boxes were open/unlocked. Many other escape rooms use poppers to indicate that something is open to prevent wasting time looking around to see what has just happened. Once the room was over our game master didn’t care to ask if we had any questions or even tell us what we had to do next. He then had the nerve to ask us to leave a review with his name. This was my first time at this location and it’s safe to say I won’t be coming back or recommending it to any friends. Overall this is the worst experience I’ve ever had at an escape room. To me, it’s not a flex to have a room so difficult that most people can only make it halfway through. To me that just screams poor room and puzzle...

ill be honest at first i thought this place was going to be like sketchy because it was so quiet and plain looking on the outside but holy moly was i wrong. these rooms were so detailed and fun and dont even get me started on the staff they make it so funny i wish i could pay to get a recording of our hour in the room. although i was getting annoyed because im not good at figuring puzzles things out and my boyfriend does all the work, it was still such a good time and a big component of that was because of the staff they are all so incredibly funny. my boyfriend and i came here for the first time like a week ago we did the bank heist and it blew me away when we had to crawl around and stuff thats so clever. we did the mayan tomb one today and it was so hard for me but its ok i still had fun. especially for the price which is only $30 which is literally the best deal ever most escape rooms are twice the amount and less creative. sorry this is super long but i just wanted to express how much fun we had...