Room Escape Artist

The Roosevelt Escape Room is one of the best games in San Francisco. Here are our other recommendations for great escape rooms in San Francisco.

Maybe a slightly smaller stick?

Location: San Francisco, CA

Date played: September 1, 2016

Team size: 6-12; we recommend 8-10

Duration: 90 minutes (with the opportunity for additional time)

Price: $410 per time slot

Story & setting

Set inside of another portion of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, we were once again cast as the same characters from The Great Houdini Room Escape, attempting to solve Teddy Roosevelt’s challenge. The whole sequel thing felt forced and unnecessary.

The game was deceptively large and the set was pretty damn incredible. Even when the seams showed, it was impressive. It felt like there was always something new to discover in this massive, 90-minute game.

Puzzles

Like The Great Houdini Room Escape, this was a puzzler’s game. Puzzle after puzzle, there was a lot to figure out and interact with.

The Roosevelt Room included two of the most brilliant puzzles I have ever encountered in a room escape.

Standouts

The aforementioned two incredible puzzles.

The first puzzle was a brilliant on-ramp for the room; it got everyone involved and functioning as a team.

The largely invisible application of technology was very well done.

The scope of the Roosevelt Room was staggering.

It was a large team room escape that truly kept a large team busy throughout the entire game.

Our gamemaster was so damn charming.

Losing teams are granted extra time to complete the experience.

Shortcomings

This may be weird to say, but it was a little bit too large. The game felt like it would have been better had some portions been edited down or sped up.

One of those incredible puzzle interactions seriously lacked in cluing. There was no chance that our team was going to figure out how to get started without a push in the right direction from our gamemaster.

Far too many puzzles required a lot of task-based or repetitious work after we had figured out how to solve them. Really cool interactions overstayed their welcome.

The puzzle quality was uneven. There were groups who worked on one series of puzzles that felt cheated when they saw what the rest of the team had been working on.

I had a very annoying technology failure.

Should I play Palace Games’ The Roosevelt Escape Room?

Palace Games is clearly selling a massive, premium experience. Costing a little over $400 per team, in a enormous, custom-built, technology-driven environment, they have made a special game. And they know it. They are all about the experience; they want everyone to experience every last drop of the game, even the teams that lose.

The downside of all of this is that it felt like it was a little bit too much. We ran over by about 15 minutes, but long before we were playing on bonus time, we had players looking at their watches. There was room to edit down or simplify some of the interactions in this game. It would be better for it.

This game is great for teams of experienced players who puzzle together regularly. It was not the best game for the hodge-podge of wonderful friends that I cobbled together on my last-minute work trip. This is a game that requires a cohesive, experienced team to truly get the most out of it.

That said, if you cannot pull the perfect team together, pull a group together anyway and play it. This is an unusual and special game. It’s worth spending a little too much time inside of it.

Book your session with Palace Games’ The Roosevelt Escape Room, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.