Escape Room Review: Breakout Games’ Kidnapping 2: Afraid of the Dark and Escape Waukesha’s Final Chapter
In my latest review of southeastern Wisconsin escape rooms, I’m covering one from a national chain, and one local independent business.
Breakout Games has numerous branches throughout the U.S. including Milwaukee, and The Kidnapping is one of the chain’s most famous and popular rooms. As of this writing, I have not played The Kidnapping. Recently, they created a second quasi-sequel room, but absolutely no knowledge of the prior room is necessary to play Kidnapping 2: Afraid of the Dark.
Kidnapping 2: Afraid of the Dark is a horror room. You enter the room blindfolded, and the game master leads you into the center of the room before leaving. You hear a creepy voice admitting to kidnapping you and that you have one hour to escape, and you remove your blindfolds to realize the room is in near total-darkness.
You have to communicate so you don’t bump into each other, and the first portion of the game (it took us at least fifteen minutes before we solved enough puzzles to get a little light) requires you all to feel around the room and solve puzzles entirely by touch and memory. Along the way, at least one member of the group will touch something rather disturbing. If you pick up an item and drop it, you have to crawl on the floor until you find it, so hold on tight to everything you find. As you solve more puzzles and gain more light, you gradually discover where you are, figure out what kind of person has kidnapped you, and uncover more puzzles.
Technically, the room has two potential problems. One early clue requires you to listen to sound, and the last portion of the sound clue is very hard to understand. The second is a keypad used in the next-to-last puzzle of the game. It’s a special keypad placed over another pad, and if you stand over it and press the buttons like I did, you may not get the result you want. You should kneel or squat, and push the buttons with your finger parallel to the ground to get the necessary result. Otherwise, no excessive physical effort is needed.
My friends and I completed the room with about ten minutes to go. Our game master claimed that Kidnapping 2 was their toughest room, and though it may have a lower escape rate, I’m not sure it’s really the hardest room, as different rooms have different kinds of puzzles that different people may find challenging.
Having played three previous rooms at Escape Waukesha, I was really looking forward to Final Chapter. It’s a mystery-themed room. A famous writer has been poisoned, and you must search her house to figure out which of nine suspects is the killer and which poison was used. The correct killer and poison must be identified in order to win, and you only get one guess.
The room itself is a good one. The puzzles are moderately challenging but none were frustrating. If your group divides up, some players will play no role in solving some problems. Towards the end, one portion of the game requires stooping through a very low portal, and players with trouble bending and crawling may be unable to do this. If you have back issues, explain this to your game master prior to beginning the game, and arrange to be let into a certain portion of the room through the service door when the time is right.
The big problem with the room is the murder mystery itself. You can waste a lot of time reading suspect dossiers that are essentially red herrings. The solution is supposedly logical, and it is, but the logic requires you to think a certain way. As in the case in our group, some of the clues can be interpreted in different ways. It’s easy to narrow the suspects down to two, but the solution requires you to interpret the evidence a certain way, and when the psychology of the killer’s actions are of debatable logical sense, as in the case in our group, you can argue over who the more likely killer is. Additionally, conflicting information regarding the poison can lead to more arguing, and the inclusion of red herrings causes a complicated hurdle. We got the right killer, but identified the wrong poison, and an ambiguous clue with controversial logic left most members of our group frustrated.
These problems could be solved easily with the addition of one problem. Include, say, a locked briefcase by a detective investigating the case, and require one additional simple puzzle to open it. Inside, the detective’s case notes would guide the players towards solving the murder, providing a brief psychological portrait of the murderer and explaining why the murderer performed certain actions that confused members of our group, plus providing more tips on figuring out how the murder was committed, would eliminate the contradictions and logical issues that befuddled our group.
Both of these rooms will be entertaining for veteran escape room players, with the aforementioned caveats.
–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, 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.
