The Cranial Carnival
Brought a large group of co-workers out to Escapedom, so large that we had to split up and did all 3 of their rooms. My group went through Cranial Carnival so this review will be about that room specifically. The idea is that you have to enter a boy's mind and lock up bad memories that have traumatized him and put him into a coma. Not the most believable of premises but fine. I'll roll with it.
After explaining the backstory, the GM walked us to the "brain" door and in we went. I thought the entrance into the room was a little disappointing and could have been much more creative an in-line with the story (traveling down a dark passage way, a red slide), really anything more than just a doorway. The production in the first room was decent but really felt like a square room filled with puzzles. Other than the occasional pink squiggles on the wall, there was nothing really organic about it. With a couple of exceptions, the puzzles seemed to mirror the memories that the boy had experienced at the circus. A healthy dose of scavenging kicked off the room and we wasted time looking through the non-linear puzzles that are unsolvable until you finish the scavenger hunt. One magnet/coin maze was a difficult frustrating time sync and we had some tech issues with an 8-sided polyhedron puzzle and one "locked" door was open. That was room 1. Room 2 was a mixed bag of some clever puzzles, some not so clever puzzles (light clock), and some downright frustrating tasks (fishing). In hindsight, it was the tech issues that did us in and we came up about 2 minutes short of escaping. Not the best, not the worst room, I've done and comes in at #112 out of 168 rooms I've done to date.
Douglas E.
