Room Escape Artist

The REA team has traveled a lot in the past year, and we’re excited to celebrate the gems that we’ve found in our journeys.

We honor our favorite escape experiences each year, calling special attention to them with the Golden Lock Award.

Since we first launched this award in 2015, it’s been a joy to honor exceptional escape rooms, and watch the industry evolve, as the winning games show refinement and push boundaries that we never would have imagined back when we first started writing about escape rooms.

A New Category: Events

In the past, we have excluded short-run or event games from the Golden Lock Award. Our thinking has been that we want to give the award to games that people can book at the time of the award (and ideally far into the future).

Events could be viewed as this really cool thing that a lot of people can’t play.

Three things have changed in our thinking that have made us realize that we’re serving our community better by honoring these games:

1. Significance – Some of these events do incredible things and they deserve recognition.
2. Remounts – Many of these events – while short lived – return later, and honoring them will help raise awareness of them for future runs.
3. Access – Even with the permanent escape rooms that we honor, access is always a struggle for location-based experiences. As a team we have come to terms with the reality that as individuals, we’ll never play all of the games that we want. Access will always be a struggle. Events may add another layer of complexity to the access equation, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t deserving.

And yes, for this one year, we will dive back through our archives and honor a few stellar events that would have been given Golden Locks in the year that they originally operated.

Details

The 2023 Golden Lock Awards livestream will stream on Saturday, April 29, 2023 at 9pm Eastern.

Mark your calendar now! The link will be available closer to the event.

Past Golden Lock Awards

• 2022
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015

Thank you!

Thank you to our Patreon backers. Thank you for always letting us know about the wonderful escape rooms you find. Our Patreon Discord channel is such a great resource for travel planning!

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.