Room Escape Artist

Year 2024: West Nyack, New York

Location:  West Nyack, NY

Date Played: April 7, 2024

Team size: 2-5; we recommend 3

Duration: Tickets are for 60, 90, or 120 minutes

Price: from $29.99 per player for 60 minutes on weekdays to $49.99 per player for 120 minutes on weekends. The most popular booking is $37.99 for 90 minutes on weekends.

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.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

At Time Mission, each new portal took us to a different destination with a new challenge to solve together as a team. This over-world tied together a collection of artistic, unusual rooms filled with creative contraptions or other physical or mental playgrounds.

At Time Mission, each time we opened up a portal we could find… anything. Pinball pirate ship! Castle climbing wall! Button mirror room! The games ranged from more physical, where we needed to balance, climb, or swing, to more mental where we deciphered, matched patterns, or answered trivia. In most portals we found a combination of unlike items, where a game we understood was overlayed into a strange place and time in an artistic way. It was always intriguing to walk through a portal.

The games weren’t all created equally. Some of the builds were more elaborate than others. Some rooms were beautifully polished, but in others execution was messy or wear showed badly. Some of the tech worked flawlessly and other times it felt janky. Some of the games were lots of fun and others were just… meh. And at least one portal simply didn’t work.

With each challenge arcade we’ve visited, we’ve come to appreciate the variety in execution of this concept. Time Mission was most similar to Boda Borg, where the rooms have themes and different aesthetic designs, than the more templated Activate. For those looking for surprise and delight in the challenge arcade style, accept your mission. It’s time.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Players with abundant energy
• Fans of unusual contraptions
• Any experience level
• Adults, kids, and family groups

Why play?

• To be transported to unusual places with artistic sets and weird mechanisms
• You never know what will be in the next portal
• To accomplish goals as a team

Story

Time Mission was a time travel adventure. We journeyed through different portals, to different times. In each portal, there was a mission to accomplish. The missions balanced intelligence, strength, coordination, and speed in different proportions.

Setting

Time Mission is located in the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, NY. We checked in at a front desk and then went through the main portal (it was a standard door, portals are doors) to the land of the portals.

After putting our belongings in a locker, we walked up and down the hallways of portals, reading where we might journey to and what type of challenge we would encounter if we tapped our wrist band to enter that portal.

The portals were all distinct from one another, in aesthetic, theme, and challenge type. Some had more involved scenic decor and prop builds than others. Each one was artistic. Some challenges were more technology-triggered. Others were more mechanical.

Gameplay

Time Mission 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 Activate (multiple locations around the US.)

Core gameplay revolved around balancing, hanging, pushing buttons, solving dexterity challenging, finding patterns, solving puzzles, communicating, and interpreting what the space wanted us to do.

Overall, we found Time Mission to be more puzzley than other challenge arcades. In each room (portal) at Time Mission, our goal was to get 100 points. We could try the rooms as many times as we liked, trying to beat our previous score.

Analysis

➕ The time-travel conceit tied everything together well. We found the portal years and stories added character to the place, but unobtrusively. They were easy to ignore, for those who just wanted gameplay. Additionally Time Mission had a scenic vision for each portal. They put thought and effort into the aesthetic design of each space. As we stepped through the portal door, we traveled to a recognizable place. Each portal felt like it was made by a person.

➕ /➖  We played as a single team for the duration of our time slot. Unlike most challenge arcades where the wrist band tracks the individual, at Time Mission each person’s wrist band tracked the team. This meant only one teammate had to tap their band for the team to enter a room. We liked this affordance a lot. For larger groups, it might be frustrating that you can’t swap team configurations at will.

➖  We sometimes struggled with how to interact with the portals. Some portals had extra scanners inside that individuals had to scan, which wasn’t always clear, and didn’t always work properly. There were a lot of different sounds, and we weren’t always clear whether we’d tapped in properly. This was all complicated by the tech feeling just a little less responsive than we wanted. We found we could only be sure if we were playing by checking if the portal timer was counting down.

➕ In each portal, we were striving to get 100 points. We always knew the goal, and could see how well we’d done on the score board in the room. We appreciated knowing how well we did, and this helped us decide how to spend our time, in terms of whether we wanted to try again to get a higher score, or move on to something more achievable or more fun for our group.

➕ Nothing was impossible for anyone in our group of 3 mobile adults. In comparison to other challenge arcades we’ve visited, Time Mission had the narrowest skill band. We could do at least okay at all the physical challenges, even if we couldn’t 💯 them. We expect adults with less puzzle experience will do at least okay at all the more intellectual challenges, even if they can’t solve them all the way through.

➕ The portals were inventive. They often combined games and settings in unusual ways. Time Mission built a lot of weird contraptions, which we loved interacting with. We also appreciated the portal that was simply a photo booth. Because social media.

➕/➖ The gameplay varied heavily from portal to portal. Some were a lot more fun than others.

➖  Time Mission made some questionable design decisions in the build out of some portals. In one instance one portal was visible through a window of another portal, and this window confused these unrelated experiences. Occasionally red herrings or finicky tech marred an otherwise interesting portal. The tech often felt janky and under-tested.

➖  We encountered significant wear on a number of props.

➖ We enjoyed the games and the environments, but we were never wowed by a single portal. We had played all of these game mechanics before, in other environments. The novelty was in the implementation, and it was often delightful, but never awe-inspiring.

➕ Time Mission recommended buying a 90-minute time slot. This felt like the right amount of time. They also offered 60-minute or 120-minute slots, and the pricing scaled appropriately. We appreciated the booking flexibility. At $37.99 per person on the weekend, Time Mission was less expensive, per minute, than Activate’s New Jersey location, and about on par with Activate’s other locations around the country.

➕ We appreciated the water cooler and bathrooms available next to the portals. Once we got our wrist bands, we never had to go back into the mall.

Tips For Visiting

• There is a parking lot.
• There are plenty of food options in the mall.

Book your session with Time Mission at Palisades Center, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.