Room Escape Artist

We all live in a puzzle submarine.

Location: New York, NY

Date played: March 27, 2017

Team size: 2-8; we recommend 4-6

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: $28 per ticket

Story & setting

While exploring a deserted island with our friends we happened upon an old diesel submarine. We climbed aboard the boat and found ourselves locked in and descending. We had an hour’s worth of oxygen left to figure out how to surface the sub and save ourselves.

The set looked fantastic. The entirely custom construction blew away older Escape The Room NYC sets. The shape of the room, the doors, and the manner in which they made us feel like there was a world outside of the room was superb.

Puzzles

Even with the impressive set, the puzzling remained front and center.

The early puzzling consisted of fairly standard but well-executed escape room-style puzzles. With the late game puzzles, we moved through a story-driven adventure.

The puzzles kept most of our large team engaged at any given point throughout the room escape.

Submarine focused more on exploration and discovery than on scavenging through the set.

Standouts

The set was exceptional. When I had some downtime in the middle of the game while my teammates puzzled, I wandered around taking it all in. There were tons of dials, buttons, and gauges that were merely part of the set. While upon an initial glance I had internally freaked out because it seemed that the scenery overload could lead to confusion, it was actually easy to tell the important controls from the unimportant ones.

The puzzling was good fun. The solutions felt rewarding. We could witness the results of our progress as we moved through the room escape.

There were some great puzzles, expertly crafted to require the involvement of multiple players.

One recurring task was both compelling and kind of annoying; it was deliberate and it worked well in spite of its repetitious nature.

While trapped in the Submarine we actually felt like there was an exterior world. Brilliant.

Shortcomings

We experienced a major technical malfunction: many of the excellent puzzles lacked feedback. We solved at least two of them purely by lucky timing. In this tech-driven adventure, feedback is crucial and should be checked with every reset.

Much of the second half of Submarine followed a narrative arc where the puzzle solutions furthered the story… except for one puzzle that shifted back to non-narrative “escape room logic.” Had this puzzle been in an escape room without a narrative, or even appeared before the story had kicked in, it would have been fine. In this case, it felt out of place and strangely disappointing.

That same puzzle centered on a prop that felt cheap and out of place in the otherwise gorgeous set. There was one other prop that felt like it had been carried over from an older escape room and didn’t belong in this artfully designed and constructed world.

There was some 3D modeling that could have looked a bit more compelling, especially in comparison to the set’s beauty.

Should I play Escape The Room NYC’s Submarine?

Submarine introduced the next level of set and puzzle design from New York City’s first escape room company.

After our most recent experiences at Escape the Room NYC, we had started to count them out. They might have been first, but newer players had surpassed them. With Submarine, Escape the Room NYC is back in the picture and we welcome this return to form.

If you enjoy puzzles, teamwork, adventure, and how these can come together to serve a purpose, in a craft so unlike a room in the Manhattan building you entered from the street, I recommend Submarine.

This will be a challenging escape room for newer players, but it is well designed and conquerable at all experience levels.

Bring a full team, I wouldn’t recommend taking this plunge with strangers.

Book your hour with Escape The Room NYC’s Submarine, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Full disclosure: Escape The Room NYC provided media discounted tickets for this game.