Room Escape Artist

You may have noticed that the Regional Escape Room Recommendations Guides page appeared in our navigation, unannounced, back in October.

This is a new dropdown under “Find a Room” in the main navigation.

We’ve been writing these recommendations for a while, but now they are all collected in one place so that you can easily find them.

The Structure of Recommendations Guides

Room Escape Artist recommendations guides are divided into sections so that you can find a room that fits your needs. Common categorizations that you’ll find across many of the guides include:

• Set & Scenery-Driven
• Puzzle-centric
• Tech-heavy
• Newbie-friendly
• Big Group Games
• Spooky & Scary
• Games with Actors

You’ll frequently find games listed under multiple categorizations.

The guides also include a “Market Standouts” section at the top. The games in this section could stand out because they are doing one thing spectacularly or because they are doing a lot of things well. They could be unusual creations or typical escape rooms executed really cleanly. Find them again in the categories to learn a bit more about each standout escape room.

Creating & Updating the Recommendations Guides

When we travel to a new region or city, we try to cover a wide range of games. We aim to visit multiple companies, trying at least one game at each. This helps us understand what the region has to offer and review in context.

We won’t pretend that these guides are comprehensive recommendations lists for each city or region. Due to time and travel constraints, we sometimes don’t get to all the games we would have liked to visit in a region.

Each recommendation guide is labeled with the date we last updated it. It sometimes takes us a few years to return to a city. If you’re looking at an older guide, it’s likely that new companies and new games have opened since we visited and they may not be listed. Refer to our escape room directory to see all the options in a given region.

Add Your Comments

If you visit a city and play something outstanding, please comment on these recommendations guides to let folks know about additional companies and games in a city or region. We encourage you to note a category in your comment, for example that a game is “puzzle-centric.”

Your comments will help traveling players, including us, next time we return to the city or region.

Coming Soon

You’ll see on the Regional Escape Room Recommendations Guides page that there are additional guides coming soon. We’re aiming to publish these and update others in the first part of 2020. Stay tuned.

Other Recommendations Lists

Golden Lock Winners

For additional escape room recommendations, check out past Golden Lock Award winners. This is the Room Escape Artist award for our favorite games we played in a given calendar year.

• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015

Tune in for the livestream of the 2019 Golden Lock Award winners on January 4, 2020.

TERPECA Winners

You can also refer to the Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts’ Choice Award (TERPECA), an attempt to find the best escape rooms in the world by leveraging the rankings of the most experienced escape room enthusiasts in the world.

As we’ve said before, we recommend referring to the top 200 (or so) games on the TERPECA list as a collection of recommendations and ascribing less value to the specific ordinal rankings. There are tons of amazing games to play and many of them are on that list.

Keep Helping Us Find Great Games

Everyone needs help finding great games, even us. We can’t play them all and we’d rather shine a light on the fantastic escape rooms then wave the flag about the mediocre ones.

If you know of something truly amazing and worthy, we always love hearing about it. We keep detailed lists of the games that readers recommend. These are always at the top of our play-list if we end up near them.