Room Escape Artist

Tons of fun!*

*If you go to any other location besides New Jersey. Read on to understand why.

Location:  East Rutherford, NJ

Date Played: April 6, 2024

Team size: 2-5; we recommend 3

Duration: 45 minutes

Price: $24.99 per player Monday-Thursday, $29.99 per player Friday-Sunday.

Ticketing: Public, but also Private. There are multiple groups accessing game rooms at the same time, but each room is private for your team while you are in it.

Accessibility Consideration: Not everything will be accessible to everyone, mostly due to physical elements. Most of the challenges at Activate require some physicality. Of note, Activate relies heavily on color and will be challenging for players who are not fully color-sighted.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

I expect we would have loved Activate if we’d visited any location besides The American Dream Mall in East Rutherford, NJ.

Activate was pure, uninhibited fun. We felt like children – running, jumping, and pushing buttons in brightly colored environments. The games required teamwork and collaboration. The games were joyous. I had so much fun playing these games with David and our friend Deb (who is way more athletic than either of us!) It was high energy.

Furthermore, there was a lot of gameplay in Activate. Each physical room housed multiple games, and each game had multiple levels. I was impressed by how many different types of challenges could exist within one physical room build. With the same minimal inputs, there were many different interactions. Activate created a lot with a little.

Activate didn’t have a story or over-world; it was a playground. It wasn’t art. I never felt that narrative or artistic vision was missing, although I can see how some players might find Activate hollow. I like games for the sake of games… especially if the games are fun, which they were! I like understanding my goal and striving to improve, to reach the next level or a higher score. I wished the points earned at Activate were more clearly tied to actions. However, overall, Activate excelled delivering the experience it intended: a playground of fast-paced, high-energy, team-oriented challenges.

I would absolutely go back to Activate if I lived near any other Activate. Unfortunately, the location at American Dream Mall only offers 45-minute time slots, and this is not enough time to fully enjoy Activate. The feeling that our minutes were too precious to waste clouded an otherwise joyful time playing and negatively impacted our game selection. We were always in a rush. At almost any other Activate location sessions are 75 minutes, as they should be. To add insult to injury, we paid the same amount for our 45-minute session as we would have paid for a 75-minute session elsewhere.

Go to Activate. It’s amazingly fun. Don’t go to Activate in New Jersey. It’s a rip off.

Who is this for?

• Puzzle lovers
• Athletes
• Players with abundant energy
• Arcade fans
• Any experience level
• Adults, kids, and family groups

Why play?

• High energy gameplay
• Fun teamwork challenges
• Bright, playful environment

Gameplay

Activate fits best into the entertainment category “challenge arcade.” By this, we mean a facility where teams play a range of different quick-play physical/ mental games that they opt into from what’s available and not currently occupied by another team.

Challenge arcades are typically less puzzle-focused than escape rooms. In this way, it’s similar to Boda Borg and Level99 (Boston), Bam Kazam (Phoenix), and Time Mission (New York).

Core gameplay revolved around running, jumping, balancing, pushing buttons, finding patterns, communicating, and acting and reacting quickly.

Story

There isn’t any story – not in the individual games and not in the overarching facility.

Challenge arcades don’t often have story, but on a scale for the amount of story or overworld we’ve experienced across different challenge arcades, Activate had the least. There was no in-world reason for being there playing the games. They were just fun challenges.

Setting

We visited the Activate location in New Jersey at the American Dream Mall in East Rutherford. It was tucked away in the back corner of a section of the mall that had a lot of games and some food options. The American Dream Mall is a bizarrely opulent venue… it looks like it was commissioned by a dictator who was enchanted by the idea of an American mall.

Inside of Activate was an entrance area with lockers. From there we could turn down a hallway with doors. Each door had a panel next to it showing information about the game. We could tap our wrist bands to enter an unoccupied game.

Each room had a different physical build out. These were generally large spaces with buttons on the walls and/ or interactive floors. The lighting was brightly colored. The game rooms were partitioned in different ways; they all had various props, buttons, and sensors placed in specific places.

We learned later that they also had places to set your phone in some games, in case you wanted to record action video of yourself playing for social media.

Analysis

➕ Playing games at Activate was joyful. We felt like kids. We ran, jumped, climbed, threw… and just played.

➕ Activate created a lot of game variety with relatively few components. With minimal types of buttons, sensors, and lights, they created a wide variety of different challenges, both physical and mental.

➕ We each received a wrist band that we tapped to enter the games. These wrist bands were high quality and looked good. They were incredibly adjustable and would be comfortable on any size wrist.

➖ When we signed in to activate our wrist bands, we each had the option to create our own player name or we could select a randomly generated name. We opted for random because we love silliness. David’s randomly generated name was Lame Raccoon. Activate censored any names they deemed inappropriate. We don’t take issue with this. However, we did take issue with them censoring David’s name as LameRac####, since they generated it. Don’t give out a fun name and then make the player feel bad about using it. Clean the database of words for the random name generator. Also… the censorship in this situation makes the name far more offensive by begging the question, “Why is this censored?”

➕/❓ The aesthetic was clean and polished. It looked arcade-y, but in a futuristic way. Of note, every room had the same vibe, aesthetically speaking. The look and feel of a gamespace was never surprising.

❓A few hours after leaving Activate, the different games started to blur together in my mind. Although the games felt quite different while we were there, and we had favorites that we kept returning to, they weren’t memorable as different experiences. For the most part, I remember all the games at Activate as one big playground.

➕ We loved the rainbow lighting before each game started. It was simple and pretty. Additionally, we delighted in the triumphant music that played to celebrate our wins.

➖ It was sometimes hard to tell when the game had started.

➕ The gameplay was clear. When we entered a game, a voice explained what to do. We could also opt to read the game instructions on a panel outside the room before entering it. The puzzle was less in how to play, and more in completing each challenge. At some challenge arcades, part of the challenge is figuring out what the game is asking you to do, but this was not the case at Activate. Considering how short the time slots are at Activate, this design choice was necessary. (Of note, Activate was not “puzzley.”)

➖ We encountered some maintenance issues. There were buttons that didn’t work well. Sometimes games didn’t sense quite right.

➕ There was a ton of gameplay inside Activate. Each physical room hosted multiple games. Furthermore, each game had multiple levels. The levels got progressively harder. Interestingly, the leveling up was not even; sometimes the next level was barely different and other times it was suddenly waaaay harder. It would take some time (and skill!) to master everything Activate had to offer.

➖ There were opportunities for a more intelligent system, which we would have really appreciated, especially considering the time slot was so short. For instance, we would have appreciated each room telling us which game they recommended new players start with. We were picking games completely at random and some were much easier (or much more interesting!) than others. The system could also suggest replaying the most recent game played.

➖ The points awarded felt pretty random. We couldn’t tell how well we were doing. Our only gauge of success was whether we were continually leveling up at a game.

➕ If there wasn’t another team waiting for the room we occupied, a green button flashed and pushing it let us continue, even if we’d messed up and needed to start over. We really appreciated that we didn’t have to leave the game and re-enter if the facility wasn’t busy. This saved us valuable time.

➖ We keep referencing our time slot because it was this dark cloud that loomed over our time at Activate. The 45-minute time slot was painfully short. It was so short, in fact, that it was “anti-fun.” We felt a lot of pressure to use our time optimally. It was a major “feel bad” the entire time we were in the facility. Even when we added more time, the options were more short windows.

➖ To make us feel worse, we looked up Activate’s pricing after we left the game and found that American Dream Mall offers the shortest play time at the highest price of any Activate location. The weekend price was $29.99 per person for 45 minutes. This comes out to $0.67 per minute. At most other Activate locations players book for 75 minutes for the same price. If we could have booked a 75-minute slot, that would have dramatically changed the tone of our time at Activate. Do not visit this Activate location; it’s a rip off.

❓Activate has a few affordances for the very short window of play. First, the wrist band gives players access to one more play after time runs out, which was kind. Second, there is a special deal for adding extra time that is only available to players currently in the venue.

➖ We booked one 45-minute session, but added an extra session when ours ended. We paid a deposit to book, the balance when we arrived, and extra for the additional session. In the end, our total came to $88 per person for 90 minutes of play (including the wait time). This felt like an extremely high price per minute. (Furthermore, we left feeling like we’d paid for all of time in complicated increments, and didn’t have a good sense of how much we’d actually paid.)

➖ Activate pushed prizes on us (and everyone) as we left. The staff told us to think of this as a milestone. We thought of this as landfill.

➕/➖ Although the games at Activate were physical, we felt safe. We were never too high up. There were padded areas. The risks we took (such as how fast to move our bodies) were of our own volition. We were, however, worried about the safety of some green lasers.

➖ There was no water fountain or bubbler. Players should not have to buy water. This was a safety issue… and we certainly paid enough money for the privilege of playing in this venue.

Tips For Visiting

• There is a parking lot.
• There are many restaurant options in the mall.

Book your session with Activate, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.