Escape Games NYC – Room 745 (Portable Escape Room) [Review]

There’s been a murder in our apartment.

Location: your choice near New York, NY

Date Played: April 5, 2018

Team size: 5-10; we recommend 5-6

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: $30 per person with a minimum of 20 players for a single group bookings; $1,500 to buy the game for resale

Ticketing: Private, designed for corporate bookings

REA Reaction

Escape Games NYC brings Room 745 to corporate groups. They took escape room-style gameplay, focused it on deduction, and packed it into 2 portable trunks. The gameflow worked pretty well and engaged the group. Even with corporate groups of inexperienced puzzlers, however, we recommend smaller team sizes so that everyone can participate in the experience… because it’s a game worth playing.

Room 745 is not on the same level as the best of Escape Games NYC’s real life escape rooms, but it offers something else. It comes to you.

Book this for a groups of at least 20 people. Room 745 is not for casual escape room goers.

Who is this for?

• Corporate groups
• Large parties

Why play?

• It comes to you.
• It fits on your table.
• It can engage a lot of people with escape room-style puzzling.

Story

William Smith had gone missing from The Grand Budapest Hotel. World famous detective Sherlock Holmes had been brought in to crack the case, but tragically Mr. Holmes had been found murdered. Holmes, however, had suspected that his life was in peril, so he had hidden and encoded the evidence among his possessions.

We had to rifle through his things and determine who had committed both crimes.

Setting

This was Escape Games NYC’s portable game. It is typically delivered to corporate gatherings. In this case, it was set up on the table in our apartment.

The game arrived with our traveling gamemaster in two suitcases. After a standard escape room rules introduction, our gamemaster set a 60-minute clock, and we opened the cases and began searching, puzzling, and deducing.

Gameplay

Escape Games NYC’s Room 745 was a deduction-based escape room with a low level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around searching and solving puzzles.

There were two unusual features of this game:

• It was brought to our home (or office).
• The goal was not to escape a room or find a McGuffin, but to deduce who had committed the crimes.

Analysis

+ The searching and puzzling felt good and escape room-like.

+ Aesthetically, the contents of the suitcases belonged together. Escape Games NYC judiciously applied copper paint to items that didn’t fit the color palette. This may sound like a minor thing, but it made a big difference.

– There was a complex meta puzzle that offered no feedback until you needed to solve it. We didn’t lean on the gamemaster to solve this, but I suspect that the gamemaster frequently has to step in to guide teams through this puzzle.

– Time mattered a great deal in this game and Escape Games NYC shifted between using base 12 and base 24 time. This added unnecessary confusion to the game. We recommend using only one or the other.

– There’s a ton of reading… not all of it is relevant.

+ Everything fit comfortably on our table. We didn’t need to rearrange our furniture or make other parts of our home available for the game.

+ Escape Games NYC can run up to 5 teams concurrently through separate versions of this game. This would be fantastic for large groups.

– This game can be played with up to 11 people per game, which seems like entirely too many people given the volume of content. This game will become increasingly challenging with each person added after about 5 people, and there will be less to do for each person. I’d recommend negotiating pricing and structures that put no more than 8 people on an individual game (and if possible, cap teams at 6 people).

+ Given that this game is primarily a corporate team building activity, all of our teammates felt that this would be a good game to play with their respective companies.

+ The game is brought to you. Our gamemaster handled setup and breakdown quickly and efficiently, entirely on this own. (He was also pleasant company!)

Tips for Visiting

• The gamemaster brings Room 745 to you.
• You need only supply a table and chairs for the participants.

Book your hour with Escape Games NYC’s Room 745, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: Escape Games NYC comped our tickets for this game.