Escapology Escape Rooms Holmdel — Local services in Holmdel Township

First off want to say that the staff is awesome. Accommodating, kind, super high energy and absolutely focused on making sure gamers enjoy their experience. No doubt about it, great experience with staff and general process. To get a 5 star review, should mean (at least in our opinion) perfection or at least “the best” experience possible. Our group of 4 have been enjoying escapes rooms and there are a few things that took us out of the games/puzzles and really just kinda took the experience level down. Will not elaborate TOO much or give away any clues, however after doing Mansion Murder, Lost City, and Mayday we feel that the over all issues in general to the rooms/puzzles are:

Disjointed or disconnected puzzles, lack of story line relevance or depth, and puzzle process felt super linear. Some puzzles seemed “hard” only because there just didn’t feel like any connection to the themes of the rooms, or connection to story line. Other times the hard puzzles were just very far reaching to connect “this goes with that”. So much so that it didn’t feel like they made any sense, and would even register as a potential red hearing. Super linear puzzles are fine once in a while, but if you like being able to work multiple puzzles at a time it doesn’t seem like the room designers want that. This really becomes an issue with anything more than 3 people. Imagine trying to solve a puzzle that legitimately makes zero sense because it is not remotely connected to the story, theme, or anything else in the room, AND you all have to work on it together, and no one can do anything else to make progress. Ultimately, it just doesn’t work out with larger groups and being stuck only because a puzzle just doesn’t match the game or a piece of the puzzle is off, broken, or wrong...you end up all sitting on your hands.

Another big issue we ran into was attention to detail to the games, puzzles, equipment. Each room had something that either didn’t work properly or has been used so much that it’s illegible or unusable. Again, without giving anything away, had we not been stuck, asked for a hint, and been told “this thing was supposed to happen, did it?” Only then did it prompt the staff to assist or correct the issue. By no means am I saying that this place or these rooms are falling apart, but if the expectation is for us as gamers to have such an intense attention to detail to connect two dots that are so far reaching that they don’t make sense, then the rooms need to be maintained with and equal attention to detail as to not cause you to miss the puzzle or lock or answer simply because the room wasn’t functioning properly.

Overall these are decent rooms. We have certainly been spoiled with getting to play so many different places, so we may just have high expectations, but if this review of escapology leads to challenging the designers, and game makers to step up to really blow us away...then that’s awesome. There are some amazing rooms out there, and the potential to take these rooms to the next level of an experience is obviously there. After three games played here (2 escaped 3rd would have been if ineffective/broken elements where correct) at this time we do not feel compelled to come back.

Great rooms for people looking to get into escape rooms, but if you have been out and experienced some truly amazing rooms, you may be...

Overall, my husband and I had a disappointing experience at the Holmdel Escapology location. I booked the Mansion Murder room five days in advance. We were scheduled for 2:10 pm on a Wednesday afternoon. We arrived at the location about ten minutes early and had already completed our waivers online. But when we checked in, the woman behind the desk claimed we had missed our reservation time of 1:50 pm. I had to pull up the confirmation email, reminder text messages, and email receipt showing we had paid to prove our room time was actually 2:10 pm. At that point, she continued to try to turn us away because they had a private event scheduled for 3 pm. She claimed we shouldn’t have been able to book 2:10 pm but clearly, we were able to. She then offered to let us play but with limited time, which we refused. We did not argue with her, just said we had a paid reservation, were there early, and still expected to play our full game. Ultimately, she agreed but made the comment as we headed to the room that they might give us extra hints to help speed us along. The room itself was fine. We knew it was one of their most difficult rooms and while we made really good progress initially, as we got towards the end, we repeatedly got stuck on the same puzzle. What we found most frustrating was that we ultimately did ask for a few hints and it was obvious our host wasn’t paying any attention to our game - every time we asked for a hint, he had to ask us where we were in the puzzle and then still gave us irrelevant hints for parts of the puzzle we had already solved so we would just have to ask again. Finally, when the game was over (we did not escape) and we were leaving the room, my husband commented on how quickly the hour seemed to have passed. Checking the time, we realized we ultimately weren’t even given the full hour. We had entered the room around 2:07 pm. Then there was still the brief introduction from the employee, and then the introductory video to go through. The 60-minute countdown couldn’t have started until 2:10, at the earliest. When we checked the time, a couple of minutes after we finished and the employee had shown us what we missed, it was 3:04 pm. They cut time out of our game to try and accommodate the private party. We believe we ultimately got to play for 50 minutes or so, maybe a couple minutes longer. We should complained immediately but we honestly didn't feel like dealing with the woman behind the front desk again. Overall, the room itself wasn't bad but our experience dealing with the employees was terrible. We'd never return to...

My coworker and I both work at an escape room. We like playing lots of rooms and had planned to come to New Jersey for a day and this place caught our eye. We played Murder Mansion. The rooms looked really cool, concept and design all seemed very good quality so we gave it a shot. Upon arrival the staff was a little awkward, friendly enough but we didn’t feel very welcome.

While the room was cool in design, the lack direction through the puzzles and when we were struggling we expected a little bit of extra help with things that we knew we were doing right but things weren’t happening. There were many times where we solved something and attempted to use the solution and a prop did not seem to work as intended and took us multiple tries to do it, that was after redoing our solution and coming to the same conclusion and eventually getting it after wasting over 10+ minutes on it. It felt as though some of the props were faulty due to us both attempting the same things and it not working until later in the room after wasting much of our time. On top of that, there were some puzzles we ended up having to guess the answers based on the way to get the answer not being clear and when we asked for help, got a generic clue which we already knew how to do, but did not understand how to get the answer that was being asked of us.

At the end when they were explaining the rest of the room, we were disappointed to find there was much more and the explanation felt very vague, like she didn’t fully know the answer, saying things like “well you use the thing with this thing and it does this.” And so on, which left it less clear than when we were in the room.

Overall, the concept was cool and the design of the room was good but the props and experience felt very unenjoyable. We’re unsure if this is location based or what but I don’t feel as though the experience was worth the drive/price we...