Escape The Game: Escape By The Bell

This is a terrible escape room. First-timers may find it tolerable for lack of any comparison, but enthusiasts should steer clear---don't even consider it.

Ultimately this game is not fun. The room is full of time-wasting activities and there is only _one_ real puzzle that I can recall. One example of how much of your time this room wastes is that it is full of three- and four-digit padlocks. When you complete a task you get a numerical code, and then you have to enter it in all of the padlocks (there's a lot of them) until you find the one it fits. At one point, around 20 minutes in, my partner and I were were having such little fun that we were independently considering leaving the game. Had we of known that this is how we each felt we probably would have left.

Another major issue is that you get dragged through the room by the host who incessantly messages you via the hint system. Before you've even had a chance to think *bing bong* another clue instruction has appeared on the screen. However, without the hints the game would not be possible to complete within the time limit: there's no flow or sense of direction in the room, and without the hints you're essentially completing random tasks in a random order.

Apart from how frustrating and tedious this room is, it also manages to break some cardinal sins of game design: moving some of the props will render a couple of the "puzzles" unsolvable, and some "puzzles" _require_ hints to be able to know what to do.

It would be quite simple to improve this room and make it a passable budget escape room. My recommendations would be: (1) just remove the time-wasting "puzzles"; (2) only provide hints when requested, and instead provide some in-game guidance so there is a sense of what to do next (and first); and (4) fix the props so that puzzle solutions don't rely on their initial position.

For a bit of balance I'm going to finish with some positive comments about this room. _Please don't let this persuade you to visit_; they do not make up for the above problems.

First of all I liked the school theme. It's simple, you don't see it very often, and it should be able to be achieved on a budget. I don't think that they quite pulled off the classroom vibe in this case (the room is a bit small), but it's one of the better things about this room.

Secondly, the one puzzle in the room is actually pretty decent. We didn't get the solution quite right, so we had to guess the last digit of the code. It was unclear to me whether we'd made a mistake, or the puzzle didn't have a guaranteed solution. Either way, solving it was the best part of the hour, and if the puzzle is correct it is a good well-themed puzzle.

And finally, a few of the other "puzzles" constitute good ideas, although I don't think that they have been realised very well in this room.