A very limited free escape room promoting travel to Virginia Beach.
Location: Brooklyn, New York (Williamsburg)
Date Played: April 18, 2018
Team size: 1-4; we recommend 3-4
Duration: 20 minutes of gameplay + post-game entertainment
Price: Free for one weekend only (April 21-22, 2018)
Ticketing: Public
What’s Going On?
The Virgil A. Peach Travel and Adventure Co is a popup storefront for a limited run escape room promoting Virginia Beach as a travel destination.
The storefront is set up as a travel agency with the staff representing the history of the last 50 years. The game itself was a 20-minute race through the past and present of Virginia Beach, highlighting and alluding to all of the various forms of entertainment available to visitors.
The escape room concluded in a speakeasy with food and alcoholic beverages that represented the region’s cuisine.
I attended a complementary media preview. The experience will be free to the public when it opens, but space will be incredibly limited. It will be only open on April 21 & 22, 2018.
REA Reaction
Escape To Virginia Beach pleasantly surprised me. You never know what you’re going to get from a popup promotional escape room.
The staff was on top of things. The set was large and the game played like an escape room. Moreover, it visually communicated about Virginia Beach without beating me over the head with messaging or a hard sell.
From a gameplay standpoint, Escape To Virginia Beach was a standard escape room with a lot of searching and observation and a few puzzles.
It was legitimately challenging due to the size of the gamespace and a fair amount of red herrings. It also had a lot of content for a 20-minute experience. Finally, for the true escape room nerds, there was one impressive piece of tech that was so brilliantly executed that I had to ask how it worked.
If you’ve been around the escape room block a bunch, you won’t see a lot that will blow your mind, but you will find a solid traditional escape room.
All in all, this was a fun game, at a price that can’t be beat. If you’re in the area and this sounds intriguing, go play. It was a good time.
Note that you have to be over 21 to book.
Book your session with Virgil A. Peach Travel and Adventure Co’s Escape To Virginia Beach, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.
Now that it’s over, will you tell us what the brilliantly executed tech was?
I don’t see any harm in that. It was a small thing. They had a fingerprint reader that was triggered open by a false thumb.
Now I’ve seen this many times using fake fingerprint readers and RFID… this false thumb had an actual print on it, so the reader was simply reading it. For a pop-up event it surprised me.
That’s interesting; I was actually thinking it might be the filling the water/OJ thing, though there were technical difficulties when I went through it, so the problems were not related to the experience.
The OJ thing was cool too. Generally speaking anything working with liquid is pretty challenging to execute reliably.