Art of Escape Room — Local services in Chicago

Very disappointing escape room. We did the Casino theme and I won't go back to try their other room.

To start, we were greeted by the game master who spent some time in his welcome speech trashing other escape rooma for having generic puzzles and being "chains." If that wasn't a turn off enough, the chains I've been to (and I've done A LOT) of escape rooms, had FAR better puzzles than this one.

The puzzles were in many cases obvious (like walking into the room and knowing what is going to happen before the clock even begins) and others were broken. The GM had to come fix it, which seems like a trend.

The room itself was severely lacking in style. This was not a casino themed room. It was a "casino night in the dorm room" themed room. Plain white walls with some posters hung on them, tile ceilings, and basic white trim that do not look like they are from a casino let alone the 1940s. The props they had would have been fine if the rest of the room looked the part but it didn't. Which made things like the game table look like cheap game tables you buy off Amazon (because it probably was).

Some of the best escape rooms I've done are independently owned and the rooms decorated extremely well using materials they have built or found at thrift shops. It doesn't have the shiny veneer of some of the chains, but you feel like you are transported to the time period and space of that room. This feels like your in the basement of a business building because you are.

The cost is not very different - spend your escape room...

We did “Kingdom of Night” and unfortunately it was one of the worst escape rooms we have done. We have done over a dozen escape rooms together across Chicagoland and other cities in the US. The props and decorations were very sloppy and haphazard. It felt very slapped together and low budget with things just on paper stapled to the wall. The puzzles were not fun and a couple major ones were completely nonsensical leading to frustration. Good Escape room puzzles should be challenging but logical not arbitrary. It was also very linear which leads to there not being enough to do for a group of 4.

Our game master was lovely but perhaps TOO helpful in giving us hints and clues we hadn’t asked for. She is the reason I’m giving this 2 stars instead of 1 because she was genuinely nice and kind and helpful.

Fair warning to those who plan to play this room: It requires having seen the show Game of Thrones for one major puzzle.

This is unfortunately just a bad escape room. I think it can be fixed if some of the puzzles are re-worked and some investment is made into the actual decor/props but you can tell this room was slapped together with very minimal investment or puzzle planning just to capitalize on the popularity of Game of Thrones. Do...

Our host was nice, the puzzles were mostly clever and fun, and it’s nice to offer drinks and snacks as we walk in.

But, the AC had been broken for over a week, we were told, so it was very warm inside, the waters were warm, and the candy was melted in its wrappers. It’s July, and the room is lower level with no air flow, so having broken AC is not acceptable.

There was one part of our room (“GoT” theme) that was broken and malfunctioned. In general, this room felt kinda slopped together. Lots of glue showing, hastily taped up laminated photos, just felt like a room that used to be a doctor’s waiting room from 1980, full of afterthoughts loosely attached to the theme.

And perhaps worst of all, the host kept talking to us when we didn’t ask for clues. He was guiding us through things when we weren’t even taking a long time (we got done with 15-20 min to spare). We were 4 intelligent adults talking amongst ourselves and wanting to solve this ourselves and he interjected a lot, which takes the fun out of solving an escape room. We showed up 20 min early for our scheduled time, so there should have been no...