Escape Room Review– City 13
I’m a big fan of escape rooms. Ever since a friend introduced me to them several years ago, my friends and I have visited numerous rooms around the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area, with a remarkably high success rate, if you’ll forgive a bit of bragging.
Most of the escape rooms in Milwaukee are pretty good, but a few are absolutely brilliant. One of the best is City 13, a collection of four small escape rooms that can be played individually at one hour apiece, or as a combined four-hour experience with additional venues.
All good escape rooms have a theme, and City 13’s general theme is that you’re a team of superheroes battling a gang of villains known as The Steam in a post-apocalyptic city. The villains are out to obtain a number of valuable items, and you have to stop them. When you visit City 13 in Oak Creek, you enter into a large lounge, with a comfortable seating area, a pool table, a popcorn machine with additional snacks, and a small display of games, puzzles, and merchandise for sale. There’s also four lockers for your personal belongings.
When you’re ready to play, your game master gives you an overview, along with a little video to get you into the spirit of the game. As you walk through the doors, you’re amazed by the care and detail that went into the project. This isn’t a square of rented office space with a few props thrown together carelessly. The production values are great, and it actually looks like a dilapidated urban center, with dark alleys filled with garbage cans and rubber rats. If you do individual rooms, you’re led to one of four large buildings and let inside.
The first room, The Armory, is the smallest and easiest of the rooms. It’s a room filled with crates and lockers, and you have to find items, work mechanisms, and solve puzzles to retrieve four weapons before the villains can get them. In City Reserve, you’re let inside a battered bank, and you need to find four gigantic diamonds in time. Cyber Station puts you in an abandoned train station, and you need to get the train up and running. Finally, the Neon Light Diner is a greasy spoon that hides four valuable items.
The technology that goes into these puzzles is amazing. Lasers, pneumatic tubes, magnets, flashing lights, moving floors, and other special effects make for an immersive experience. The puzzles are also complex– they go far beyond the usual “find a key, open a lock, find another key, open another lock, find yet another key, open yet another lock– no, not that lock, a different lock” puzzles. You need attention to detail, hand-eye coordination, keen observation, and memory skills. Some puzzles require ducking and bending, so some dexterity is needed, and you need to be prepared to think way outside the box.
If you choose the four-hour Escape the City puzzle (and I recommend you start by playing the four rooms individually, and then coming back a bit later after some of the details of the puzzles have faded from your mind), you begin in the dark alleyways, and you must study posters and graffiti and other clues in order to make your way into each of the four rooms. Most of the original puzzles are repurposed, changed slightly so as to make for an experience that’s both familiar and fresh, and not only that, with many new puzzles added into the mix. There’s even a fifth, small room you have to finish at the episode’s climax when you actually have to save the city from annihilation.
City 13 is a wonderful experience for escape room fans, and I hope that they come up with additional puzzle experiences to keep players coming back after all of the existing games are completed. I’ve made three trips there, playing the first three games in a marathon, the Diner several months later when it opened after the others, and the Save the City four-hour experience last Thanksgiving. My friends and I won every single game, but each room was an exhilarating challenge. I’d love an opportunity to play again.
–Chris Chan
Chris Chan’s anthology Of Course He Pushed Him and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories Volumes 1 & 2 was released on June 22nd. His first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released by MX Publishing. 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.
