Rewind.
Location: Fitchburg, MA
Date played: October 2, 2017
Team size: 4-10; we recommend 5-6
Duration: 60 minutes
Price: $28 per ticket, student discounts available
Story & setting
We stepped back in time to the year 1999 to investigate strange happenings at a local video rental store. Could we dig up the evidence we needed to figure out what was going down in this relic of the not-so-distant past?
From the cash register to the racks of VHS tapes, Escape The Video Store tossed us back a couple of decades and into a fixture of every American community: the independent video rental store. The set was loaded with nostalgia and pop culture (not references).
Puzzles
When we played Curious Escape Rooms’ first game, The Dollhouse, we sped through it. Escape The Video Store was a considerably more challenging game with layers of complexity, team-based puzzles, and a lot to accomplish.
Standouts
Curious Escape Rooms outfitted Escape The Video Store with authentic props. I’m hard-pressed to think of things in the escape room – aside from hidden mechanisms and electronics – that were not born of the 1990s.
The puzzling in Escape The Video Store was challenging and fair… and there was a lot of it.
While the set was busy and searching was a core component of this escape room, we weren’t bogged down with endless searching drudgery. Whenever we were searching, we had well-defined targets, and we knew when we had found them. In a set that could have housed endless red herrings, the game flowed well.
Shortcomings
Curious Escape Rooms could dramatically improve Escape The Video Store with cleaner, more precise construction and execution. If they were to hide housed technology, make cuts, and finish materials with a little more care, their set design could start to shine.
Escape The Video Store relied heavily on paper. Although well presented, this escape room could be so much more if the puzzling were more deeply embedded into the set and interactions.
Should I play Curious Escape Rooms’ Escape The Video Store?
Anyone who has ever said to us “I don’t have a massive budget so I can’t make good games” has heard about Curious Escape Rooms. They have been our go-to example for a small team, operating on a low budget, in a small town, that produces interesting and worthy escape rooms by steering into their strengths. Escape The Video Store was another example of this type of design and a surprisingly different experience from the previous escape room we played with them.
In Escape The Video Store, Curious Escape Rooms built a nostalgia-fueled challenging puzzle game that I absolutely recommend for experienced players.
Newbies could take on the video store, but I think that they would enjoy it more if they weren’t learning escape room basics at the same time. I’d recommend picking up a little experience before stepping into this time warp.
If you were born after 2000… prepare to experience bewilderment at what passed for technology in the not-so-distant past.
Book your hour with Curious Escape Rooms’ Escape The Video Store, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.
Full disclosure: Curious Escape Rooms comped our tickets for this game.
