Harrisburg Escape Rooms at ABC East Lanes — Local services in Swatara Township

Awesome rooms! While my husband and I were traveling, we decided to check out a couple of escape rooms, in the area. We love escape rooms and have played over 60. Harrisburg Escape peaked our interest because their rooms are highly immersive and technologically advanced. We were a bit skeptical because the company appears to be a side hustle of the bowling alley, but upon visiting, we realized that this is not actually the case at all. In fact, Harrisburg Escape has their own building, to the left of the bowling alley, which isn’t clear on their website. This company is legit and professional. We played the “Game of Stones” and “Dracula” rooms and really enjoyed both! The rooms are very immersive, the game play flows well, the puzzles are all “high-tech” (inclusive of electronics and technology,) and the game master was attentive and made the experience really fun for us! The only negative worth noting (but not worth deducting a star for) is that if you are planning to play as only 1, 2 or 3 people, they require a room minimum price, so we payed the cost of 4 players, even though there were only 2 of us. This is a bit of a pet peeve of ours. When places charge a base minimum, it prevents customers like us from enjoying more rooms. Truth be told, we would have stayed and played another room, if we didn’t feel “penalized” by having to pay more, for being a smaller party. But, like I said, this business still gets 5 stars from me. We had a blast and were very impressed with their rooms! The next time we are planning to visit the Harrisburg area, we will definitely return here to play...

We did the zombie escape room for a friend's birthday, and we had a BLAST!!! First off, you get to dress up which completely changes the feeling of an escape room- it's the first time I've gotten into character and it was fantastic, plus the lab coat pockets came in helpful! The room itself was a great puzzle- the concept, the clues, the entire experience were well thought out and tons of fun. The BEST part was the live actor experience. We were a group of four women and three of us were clearly uncomfortable with the idea of the zombie experience but we put our big girl pants on for our friend that loves zombies (birthday girl). The actor (Johnathan) completely read his audience and adjusted his role to make us get the experience but not be too scared to enjoy the room. He truly deserves so much credit and absolutely took the room to a whole new level. We genuinely had a blast and once we realized he was reading our vibe and still living up to the experience we settled in and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Tough puzzle- we finished with 4 mins to spare and one helpful hint!!! ...

We have had decent experiences here in the past (Dracula's was fun), but the Game of Stones room was an absolute mess. Thematically it was VERY on point, but the room was short on puzzles, it was not clear when you solved them at some points, and the ending was rather dull.

Also it did not help that our host seemed very unenthused about the room, was mediocre about giving hints/paying attention, and practically rushed us out the door once finished (despite us finishing very early and wanting to talk over what had happened). At one point we asked about why a puzzle was solved a certain way since the solution to it made no sense thematically or grammatically (it was a word puzzle) - the Gamemaster just shrugged his head and said "I dunno that's how it is". As an experienced escape room goer, this is simply unacceptable - half the fun of the rooms comes from an experienced host cultivating an atmosphere.

I do not know whether they were having an off day, or whether this room is in the middle of being revamped, but definitely felt like we just got scammed out...