Bayou Escape Rooms — Local services in Lake Charles

RED HERRINGS ALERT It breaks my heart to rate Bayou Escape Rooms as a 3 out of 5 because the staff was lovely and the rooms had interesting concepts and some good ideas. Overall, we did enjoy ourselves. The problem that detracted two stars of our rating is the multitude of red herrings we experienced in the two rooms we played, one far more than the other. At this point, I believe we've done over 20 escape rooms across different cities. Most escape rooms do not have red herrings because we customers are paying money to utilize our brains in interesting ways that we don't get to in every day life through solving puzzles in a thematic or interesting environment. And we only get 60 minutes to do it in. Red herrings are meant to distract, and they create intentional bottlenecks. The worst part is that the bottleneck comes from the intention of the design of the room, rather than the players just not having figured something out yet. It takes away from the experience, because we're wanting to enjoy puzzles that can be solved, even if we fail to solve them. It's fun to discover where you went wrong with a solvable puzzle. Because then you learn something new from that process. It's never fun to find out that you were tricked. One of the rooms we did had at least 6 red herrings. Considering that most escape rooms don't even use red herrings at all, 6 is a gigantic number. All 6 of them soaked up multiples of minutes within the 60 that we were given. Other than that, it was still pretty fun. I'd just rather ask for clues because I can't figure out a puzzle, not because I am doomed to never figure out something that has no answer in the...

EDIT: As of today, 25 February 2022, management did refund my money and apologized for the "miscommunication".

My husband and I had a reservation for 1300 today. On the way, his filling came out and was in pain. We pulled up and walked in to cancel since I'm trying to get him to the dentist. I told this to the clerk. She said she would call the boss about a refund.

She returned and said we could reschedule or get a gift card. I explained we don't live here; we're stationed in Cuba and just passing through today. She still offered either a gift card or reschedule. Once again, we don't live here and those aren't viable options.

We love escape rooms and looked forward to this one but life happens and there should be exceptions made in cases like this. I just want a refund of the activity we couldn't do. They shouldn't be allowed to keep my money for zero services rendered.

Hopefully, someone will follow up with this bad decision...

Staff is nice but the quality of the rooms was not great.. puzzles were ok/fun.. the production quality of the room was just not the best. We’ve been to many many escape rooms, and this is the first where the sound from our GM was coming from a baby monitor, no judgement we understand budget, but if you were to ask for help from your GM, and you happen to be in the room “next door” you forget the baby monitor sound was in the other room so you miss what they said at the start.. so keep that in mind when asking for a clue. Another thing.. as we know usually a game begins with a video of some sort to introduce the storyline to the game, well this one didn’t have no sound no music nothing. It would’ve helped create some sort of excitement if there was at least music. It felt just a bit lack luster. We’ve done all the ones in our city so figured we would make a drive out to lake Charles for this place, but unfortunately we will not...