Escape Room Review – 60 to Escape Gurnee Mills
The 60 to Escape in Milwaukee is one of my favorite escape room companies. The Milwaukee branch has five terrific rooms with entertaining themes and some of the greatest production values you’ll ever see, including animatronics, optical illusions, incredible sets, fog, lighting, sound effects, wind machines, and overall some of the most immersive rooms one could imagine.
Milwaukee is the newest of the three branches of 60 to Escape, the others being in northern Illinois. The Gurnee Mills branch, featuring six rooms, is the oldest, but the quality is superb. Recently, my friends and I played Museum Heist and Hidden Temple. Both were great.
In Museum Heist, you are in a museum of Egyptian antiquities. As part of a team of burglars, your task is to steal a massive diamond and delete the security footage of your presence. There are five little rooms inside the big room, depending on how you count a corridor. Some of the puzzles require you to search for objects hidden throughout the area, a couple require a bit of physical dexterity in your hands, others require memory and logic (a thoughtfully provided erasable notepad is much appreciated). With giant statues, artwork, and some clever technology, the puzzles are of moderate difficulty, and the hints provided every ten minutes were just what we needed to get us through a roadblock.
The puzzles in Museum Heist are not linear, so there are multiple puzzles that can be solved in any order. Most of the time, the solutions are reasonably easy to deduce, although one or two require you to think exactly like the puzzle designers. The best puzzles require a slight but satisfying intellectual leap. We played with three people and finished with a little over three minutes to go. One issue is that the rooms are fairly small. Three players fit comfortably. Four players would probably be all right. Five or more would be a squeeze, so some players would be left out of certain puzzles.
Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of Museum Heist is that it is not soundproofed from the other rooms. You can hear the people playing in a room next to you, as well as the sound effects from their game. However, I can’t fault 60 to Escape too much for this because as our game master explained, they were required by law not to seal off the tops of the walls of the rooms in that area of the business due to fire hazard issues. I don’t know exactly why that was necessary, but if the outside noise is the result of a government regulation, then I have no quarrel with 60 to Escape.
Hidden Temple is even more immersive, as it’s soundproofed and the set is fantastic. Eight little rooms fill the big room. It’s a fantastic recreation of jungle ruins, inspired a bit by Indiana Jones, and heavily by the children’s game show Legends of the Hidden Temple. Animal images, medallions, an idol, and even the temple guards are taken straight from the show.
The opening video says that height is not an advantage in any of their rooms, but that isn’t quite true in Hidden Temple. One early puzzle requires someone to be able to reach at least six or seven feet off the ground. A stool is provided, though it might be rickety for children. Late in the game, you need to stoop through a low portal, about three feet high, so people with back problems or mobility issues might be barred from the final room. Another puzzle requires players to get down on the ground in order to press a series of buttons. Unlike Museum Heist, gameplay is linear.
While Hidden Temple does not use the same kind of animatronics as the Milwaukee branch, there is a puzzle where objects move. Shorter players will be safe, but if you’re above a certain height, six feet or so, some pointy objects will be moving at eye level, so watch your eyes. Luckily, my glasses protected me at one point, but someone could easily get a nasty poke in the eye. Small children might be frightened at times.
One issue is that two small keys are crucial to solving the room. Unfortunately, they’re easily lost and portions of the room are very dark, so if you drop one of the tiny keys in a dark corner behind a crate or something like that, you may not be able to find it. It might take several minutes to retrieve it. I made sure to hold the keys in my hands and not let them go, and it was a shrewd decision.
The darkness of the room is alleviated by a single lantern. Make sure you use it well and help each other see the subtle details of the room.
In order to solve the puzzles, you need good communication skills amongst your group, and also skillful artistic skills, as you’ll need to copy down some images onto erasable notepads in order to figure out some solutions. My friends and I finished with over ten minutes to go, and we only needed a couple of clues. We did have a ten-minute interruption in the middle of the game when something was triggered ahead of time, and we had to wait out in the lobby while it was reset. We were told this happens a lot, so be prepared for technical difficulties around the halfway point in the game.
There are some really nice special effects, mainly when you cross the “River of Death.” If you are expecting one massive prop to be an animatronic, however, you will be sadly disappointed.
All in all, these are wonderful games and I look forward to playing the other rooms.
–Chris Chan
Chris Chan’s book The Autistic Sleuth, written with the professional guidance of his mother Dr. Patricia Meyer Chan, was released on September 19th! His book on the Columbo killers, Some of My Best Friends Are Murderers, was released on September 24th! He is the author of the Funderburke and Kaiming novels Ghosting My Friend and She Ruined Our Lives and Well-Behaved Children Seldom Make History, released by Level Best Books. He is also the author of the comedic novels Sherlock’s Secretary and Nessie’s Nemesis, published by MX Publishing, as was his anthology Of Course He Pushed Him and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories Volumes 1 & 2. His Agatha-nominated book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books. His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there). It is also available in a Kindle edition.
