Time travel is tricky.
Location: New York, NY
Date played: May 7, 2016
Team size: 4-10; we recommend 4
Duration: 70 minutes
Price: $33 per ticket on weekdays, $38 per ticket on weekends and holidays
Story & setting
The gals started in Medieval Europe. The guys visited the European Western Front during World War II. Our journeys collided in the middle, in a timeless, time-traveler space where we had to escape back to the present.
The concept was neat.
The period rooms were sparsely decorated; the room decor didn’t contribute to the story.
As with many time travel books, movies, and games before it, this room escape struggled to tell a cohesive story through time and space.
Puzzles
Our team started split between two different rooms and time periods (we chose to split girls/guys.) We found puzzles that could be solved independently and puzzles that relied on trans-time communication.
When our groups converged in time’s no man’s land, we encountered puzzles relying on confounding associations. Yet, because these were based in words, they were quite hackable. We solved much of this room differently from how the designer intended.
Standouts
The concept was really great.
This was a multi-room design. The rooms connected in a thematically appropriate way that cleverly defied standard multi-room escape game design.
Shortcomings
We like hacking our own solutions, but in Room X, we circumvented too much of the design of the room escape. The logic leaps that we needed to make were frequently too large.
Early on, we could easily communicate across time without our communication devices. It was easier to shout than it was to use our walkie-talkies.
The build quality of the room was spotty, and the overall theming didn’t live up to the previous games we had played from OMEscape. This was a disappointment because the multi-era setup lent itself to really cool set design.
Should I play OMEscape’s Room X?
We enjoyed the time-period thematic nuances in Room X, but it didn’t live up to its promise.
We didn’t feel like time travelers on an adventure. We felt like players hacking at puzzles staged in loosely-themed eras. Room X started off shaky and never stabilized.
The folks at OMEscape offer excellent customer service. They are also continually iterating on their games.
At this time, we recommend both Laboratory of Biohazard and The Penitentiary over Room X for a more cohesive and exciting experience.
