Escape Room Review– Breakout Games– Brookfield, Wisconsin
Breakout Games is a chain of escape rooms with branches in nineteen U.S. states (mostly in the eastern half of the country) and South Africa as well. One of these branches is in the Milwaukee area, in Brookfield. Featuring six escape rooms, Breakout Games is the second place where I ever played an escape room and the first place I ever won an escape room. Currently, Breakout Games bookings are for private rooms, so people don’t have to play with individuals they don’t know.
The first room I’ve played at Breakout was “Museum Heist,” played with the friends who’ve been my teammates for all of the games discussed in the previous posts. The plot is pretty standard– you play as members of a group of reformed art thieves who are recruited to recover a piece of stolen artwork. It was a fun experience, and some of Breakout’s best puzzles. The puzzles were just the right level of difficulty, and though some of the technology behind some of the steps wasn’t quite as impressive as, say, City 13 or 60 to Escape, it still made for some effective moments. One of the puzzles definitely required three people minimum to work, so this is not the best room for two-person teams. Also, one of the puzzles requires that one player crouch on the floor, so players with mobility issues should be warned. It was close, but we successfully finished the game.
The second room we played was actually virtual, as during the pandemic, we were able to play games where our game master wore a camera and followed our instructions. This one was “Mystery Mansion,” where you investigate a supposedly haunted house in order to uncover the building’s secrets. This was probably my favorite room of the four I’ve played, as I enjoyed the twisty puzzles and our game master did a nice job making the experience work, and once again, my friends and I succeeded. The one problem was the design of the room– it just didn’t look like a haunted house, so much as a bunch of items that would be found in a haunted house neatly arranged in a bit of office space.
Worse still in terms of production value was “Casino,” which draws you into a James Bond-style world to track down a secret agent in a gambling house. With the bare white walls, it was clearly just a bit of office space filled with casino games, but at least the puzzles were of good quality, requiring a solid mix of skills and even including a little bit of technology at one point. There’s logic and observation and even a little dexterity involved, and as you gather up dossiers on the various suspects, you wind up having to keep track of a bunch of clues in order to find the person you want. There’s also a clearly written note telling you that it’s possible to totally mess up the game if you’re not careful, so don’t act rashly and mess up everything. I played this room with family members, and it was the first escape room they ever played. We wound up winning, and it was a triumphant moment.
The most recent room I played at Breakout was earlier this week, called “Bomb Squad.” Apparently, this room used to be called “Undercover Alley,” but due to some thematic elements involving civil unrest and biological weaponry, they changed the identity of the villainous group slightly, made the device to be deactivated a simply explosive bomb that goes boom, and changed the name. If you’ve played “Undercover Alley” in the past, be warned, it’s “Bomb Squad” now, and the remaining puzzles and design are all the same as the initial version of the game.
“Bomb Squad” is by far the most immersive of the rooms, as it definitely does NOT look like a bit of office space, but instead is made up to actually look like a graffiti-scarred alley in a run-down section of town. It’s also the most claustrophobic of the rooms. The room accepts up to seven players, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Five people at most can play the room comfortably, at least in the early portions of the game. After several puzzles have been completed, there’s a little more elbow room.
One of the problems with the room is that it’s dark. I realize that this is part of the atmosphere, and many of the puzzles use the darkness to their advantage. The problem is, even with the one flashlight available to you, it’s hard to see some portions of the room, and since a number of the puzzles can only be solved with notes that have very small print, solving the puzzles can be extra hard when you can barely read vital clues. Not only that, but one clue requires an arm that’s a lot smaller than mine to reach. I couldn’t get it, but my sister could. In Milwaukee, some of the puzzles weren’t working properly. Two bits of technology didn’t work correctly, and they had to be triggered by the game master. Furthermore, but we somehow skipped over one puzzle, and I’m not sure how we did it. Additionally, a couple of the puzzles require you to stoop on the ground to see necessary details. I’m not sure if all the graffiti plays a role in the game or if a lot of it is red herrings, as not everything was explained at the end.
Despite the problems, there’s a lot to like about the room, including some clever puzzles that require dexterity and hand-eye coordination as well as logic. My least favorite puzzle requires some physical contortions that lead to some highly dubious conclusions. I didn’t think we’d complete the room in time, but we did with eighty seconds to spare.
There are two rooms that I haven’t played yet, “The Kidnapping” and “Do Not Disturb.” In the first, you’re kidnapped by a serial killer and you have to escape, and in the latter, you must capture the villain from the previous room at a motel.
Breakout is not my favorite place for escape rooms, but I’ve had a good time with all four rooms, and I think that beginners to escape rooms would be best off starting with “Museum Heist,” “Casino,” or possibly “Mystery Mansion.” Other branches of Breakout have additional rooms, including “Submarine Survival,” “Hostage” (aboard an airplane), “Island Escape” (where you must survive a volcano), “Runaway Train,” and the one I’m most interested in, a mystery based on “Clue.” I don’t know if any of these will ever come to Milwaukee, but escape room fans should put Breakout on their list.
–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.
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