Trapped Puzzle Rooms — Local services in Saint Paul

A true experience from the start!

Reader’s digest version: Innovative and well thought-out, with high quality employees and a great variation of puzzle difficulty. Each room has a full story that you can tell was carefully put together. Favorite part is definitely how the clues received never took away from the experience, feeling like they were part of the story.

You can tell how much care and attention goes into these rooms from the moment you walk in. While I have only done a few different escape rooms, this group certainly stands out. Every employee I interacted with was helpful, polite, and most importantly engaged. They begin building the story almost immediately and kept that level of commitment until our group had escaped.

I had never done a puzzle room before trying The Apartment. I had no idea what to expect and went in with minimal expectations, not sure if it would just be a bunch of riddles or a few simple games. What I got instead blew me away. The room was filled with dozens of clues, that all somehow worked together. It felt like a well written book, complete with world building, character explanations, plot, and ending. The puzzles weren’t just cool (although ink that only appeared when the paper got warm was incredible!), they had a purpose. Plus the actual “escape” is pretty epic.

A few years later I did The Legend of Lyndale house with some friends for my birthday. Again I was impressed by the attention to detail and the amazing story created, especially since it had a horror element. It was also great to see how much the quality had grown, from an apartment with some exposed wires/tech to a whole house! The puzzles were also much more challenging (at least to me), they definitely upped the creativity level and found ways to use almost every inch of the place. My only issue was with team communication. Since the space was rather large the group you work with is bigger. Trapped also provided walkie talkies (which were more fun than expected) to share clues room to room, but not enough for everyone. It left people clumping up into smaller groups instead of working as one big team.

Regardless, the whole experience was just as amazing as before, complete with an...

Since moving to the Twin Cities 2 years ago, I have been a big fan of Trapped and have played nearly all of their rooms at all three (now two) of their locations!

Today, I specifically want to write about their new audio adventures. I have played all three, and while these were created as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, I sure hope they keep them coming as a regular part of their future programming, because these adventures are incredible!!

Since there is no physical space in these rooms, the design team is not bound by the laws of physics (or any other kind of science). This has made for some really fun gameplay mechanics.

The format of play is similar to a role playing game. You tell the narrator you want to do something, go somewhere, or observe something close up and they describe what happens next as a result of that action. Want to do something that isn’t officially a part of game as written by Trapped? Their game masters must all be improv experts because they will play along! For example, there may be an imaginary book on a bookshelf in a legal office that isn’t actually relevant to the game, but if you say, “How many pages does that book have? 324? Can you open it up to page 229 and tell me what it says?” Rather than saying something lame like, “Oh, actually, that’s just there for decoration and not part of my script,” they’ll suddenly start reading, “Due to COVID v America, several new legal requirements exist in the private sector, including [insert three minutes of hilarious filler text]...you end up reading the book for several hours, getting lost in legal jargon, only to look at your watch and realize this book hasn’t helped you at all and you’re running out of time. You throw the book out the window never to be seen again.” Of course, they wouldn’t spend so much time on this unless you’re doing really well and have a couple of minutes to kill.

Y’all these adventures are so fun, zany, and full of surprises at every turn! Play them yesterday. What are you...

Had an excellent puzzle room experience on beginner difficulty level in the Video Game Mayhem room with 2 eight year old friends, a 6 year old sibling, and us 2 parents. The game runner (Erin) was upbeat, energetic, an excellent communicator, and got us off to a great start. With a little help from us parents, the 8 year olds made their way through puzzle after puzzle and had an awesome time! The 6 year old needed help being included by the faster older kids, and didn't do many of the solves, but enjoyed the experience too. I think without parent help the kids would have needed to rely more heavily on support/tips from the game runner and may have struggled to the point that it was stressful at times, so I was definitely glad we were there to guide them just enough to keep things moving and positive. Also, with kids still learning how to cooperate and take turns doing the fun actions, I was glad there were only 3 of them. With more mature kids, a little bit larger group would be fun. Just be mindful that working together is a big part of the experience, so kids who naturally lead or are fast should be ready to hang back and be a supporter sometimes. We ran a bit over our hour and the game runner was gracious and generous in letting us finish up anyway. Highly recommend as a special activity for kids who like games and puzzles. The only thing that could be improved is that the room felt slightly worn in need of freshening up from lots of use, but the kids didn't care/notice that at all and it was very minor - everything still...