Escape Room Review– TeamEscape 262
Recently, my friends and I played all three rooms at TeamEscape262 in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Not only is it an escape room business, but there’s an axe throwing room as well, as well as a cooler full filled with water, sodas, and alcoholic beverages.
Their three rooms are “The Gold Mines of Rattler County,” “Captain Maxwell’s Shipwrecked,” and “The Haunting at Crowe Manor.” In “Gold Mines,” you are sent down a shaft, and you have two goals. The first is to escape after the elevator breaks, and if you achieve that goal, you win. There is, however, a second bonus goal, involving locating a hidden golden treasure, for the full victory. “Shipwrecked” involves a search for treasure on a pirate ship, and “Haunting” is an attempt to break the spell cast by a warlock and his coven in a haunted house. My friends and I didn’t escape the first two rooms, but we did win “Haunting” with a few minutes to spare.
Four of us played “Gold Mines,” and frankly, that wasn’t enough. It’s a big, complex room (actually, three combined rooms), and in order to solve all the puzzles in time, you need to split into pairs or do individual work. With five or six people, we might have won. We certainly came close to the first task for victory– we were just one puzzle away from winning– but we would have needed two more people to complete the second task in time– or twenty more minutes.
“Shipwrecked” was played with three of us. It’s the most spacious room (consisting of three rooms), and it would have helped to have a fourth person. The last of the three rooms on the “ship” was so dark as to be frustrating. It’s a room that requires lots of scrutiny, with plenty of meaningless items that need to be scrutinized, but important clues are subtly hidden where it’s easy to overlook them.
“Haunting” is properly creepy. We had five players, and without any one of us, we probably wouldn’t have finished. It’s the narrowest and most claustrophobic room, but we had enough space to move around. The mix of puzzles was pretty good, though players should be warned for a “gross out” moment for one unlucky player.
One issue with the axe throwing room is the sound– in some rooms you can here the thump of axes hitting the targets, which can be distracting.
The production values are enough to be immersive– it’s definitely a step above “a bunch of furniture in an office space,” but there are a number of technical problems due to worn-out equipment. Our game master had to rush into the “Gold Mines” because one laser-centric puzzle didn’t work. There are some tricky dexterity games in “Gold Mines” that can eat up time. Also, some important clues have worn away. In “Shipwrecked,” some letters and numbers are worn off the locks, and there are more red herrings there than in the other rooms, where pretty much everything is relevant. In “Haunting,” a vital clue has been wiped off a surface, leaving one clue unsolvable without help.
Another issue is that an awful lot of the puzzles are lock-based. Some of the passcodes require a leap of intuition or a knowledge of classic literature to unlock, and the problem with these locks is that they have to be lined up precisely in order to unlatch. That means you might have the code word right, but if the middle dial is one hair off from where it should be, it doesn’t work. Not only does it eat up time, but the fussy locks add to the frustration factor.
The big problem with all three rooms is darkness. I simply couldn’t read many of the clues or see little details or read the letters and numbers on some of the locks. “Gold Mines” give the players little lights on straps, and there’s a lantern to carry in “Shipwrecked.” There are only two flashlights available in “Haunting,” but you can use your phones for light.
Unfortunately, people with eyesight issues (like me) may have trouble with Team Escape 262. Stooping and kneeling are also necessary for most rooms. TeamEscape 262 is best played by a team of at least five people who have played a few escape rooms in the past. I had fun, but there are some issues that need to be addressed for an optimal experience.
Chris Chan’s novel Ghosting My Friend was released by Level Best Books on March 28th. His first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released 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.
