Escape Room Review– Escape Waukesha
The first challenge at Escape Waukesha is finding it. Located in a strip mall and office space area, the signboard at the street has a different escape room company’s name on it. My friends and I walked up and down the complex, fruitlessly looking for the business, until our other friend, who had arrived separately, texted to tell us that Escape Waukesha was at the back of the complex. Once you drive around the side, there’s plenty of parking and it’s easy to locate the storefront. They really need a sign with the correct name pointing people around the back.
The waiting lobby is reasonably spacious, with a few tables with puzzle games in one corner, across from the “photo-taking” wall. They currently have three rooms, the Lewis Carroll-themed Escaping Wonderland, the pirate-themed Captured, and the bank robbery-themed Blue Ocean Heist. My friends and I played Blue Ocean Heist.
Blue Ocean Heist requires the players to search a bank office for clues in order to break into a safe and open some lockboxes, all in order to steal some valuables from some presumably immoral people.
Visually, it’s a moderately immersive room. The first two “rooms” are a modest step up from the basic “a bunch of furniture and props in a bit of office space,” but to be fair, it looks exactly like the lobby of most banks. Aside from being windowless, if the space looks exactly like it would in real life, I can’t fault it. The vault is a bit less realistic, but it suffices.
The puzzles are of solid, moderate difficulty. We only needed a couple of hints, and most of our problems came from overlooking details in our searches. My advice to players is to check everything– if you can turn it around and scrutinize it, or move it, then do so. It should be noted that there’s a lot of artwork on the walls that is not meant to be touched. If a picture has a little dot on it, you shouldn’t touch it. If it doesn’t have the telltale dot, then more likely than not it has some role to play in the puzzle. The shelves are stocked with the usual books and knickknacks. About half of them have clues and the other half are red herrings, so you need to scrutinize every object.
The puzzles range from “find a key, use that key,” to some math and logic puzzles, to creative and intellectual leaps. One puzzle requires a very basic knowledge of vexillology, but the vast majority of the population should be sufficiently educated to know at least seventy-five percent of the necessary information, so anyone who doesn’t know the last bit should be able to figure it out by elimination.
With a four-person team, the puzzles are more than manageable. Three competent players or two master escape room solvers should be able to finish on time, but the room takes up to ten people. Escape Waukesha keeps biweekly statistics on the top three teams for each room, and at the time we finished with about fifteen minutes to spare, we were in third place for that time period.
I’d say Blue Ocean Heist is about a six out of ten in terms of difficulty, but overall, it’s a positive and enjoyable experience. If it’s not the most challenging, creative, artistic, or technologically advanced room; it’s still a good, solid room that will serve players of all abilities. Families and larger groups should appreciate it. No crawling or excessive physical activity is needed, and the only potential problem for most players is that at one point there’s a smoke effect that won’t bother most people, but initially, it made my eyes water.
Escape Waukesha changes out its rooms periodically– if you played their games a year or two ago, there was a Titanic room, an Ancient Egypt room, and one more that has since been changed. As a nod to the now-defunct Egypt room, a sarcophagus that was presumably part of the décor is now decorating the hallway. If this trend holds, I suggest that you play Escaping Wonderland, Captured, and The Blue Ocean Heist before they’re changed out again.
I enjoyed The Blue Ocean Heist, and I look forward to playing Escaping Wonderland and Captured in the future.
Chris Chan’s sequel to Sherlock’s Secretary, Nessie’s Nemesis, was published on September 3rd by MX Publishing. His 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.
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