Room Escape Artist

Update 5/6/2025: If you enjoyed this article, we hope you’ll check out our interview with Great Gotham Challenge creators Jon Seale and Ryan Patch on Season 9, Episode 4 of The Reality Escape Pod.

Slow(er) and (Olm)steady

Location: New York, NY

Date Played: July 20, 2024

Team Size: 2-4; we recommend 2-4

Duration: 1-2 hours

Availability: Select Saturdays throughout the summer: August 3, August 17, and August 31

Ticketing: Private and Public, in a way. You play with your group, but others are also playing, and you’re in a public space.

Price: $108.55 per team, plus optional picnic lunch add-ons

REA Reaction

Central Park Sprint was a polished and impressively accessible entry point to Great Gotham Challenge’s signature style of site-specific experiences.

Lasting no more than 2 hours, this light afternoon adventure was far less grueling than GGC’s flagship events while still including a representative sampling of the environmentally integrated puzzles, actor interactions, and high production value that makes GGC’s experiences stand out. Central Park Sprint guided us through one of my favorite sections of Central Park, cleverly utilizing simple puzzles as a vehicle for meaningful engagement with public art and local history.

Central Park Sprint was well calibrated to its target audience: more casual players. This may include families, dates, or newer puzzlers, as well as GGC stans looking to get their fix. Like most of GGC’s events, Central Park Sprint was still framed as a competition, with an awards ceremony at the end and rankings sent out in the following days, but don’t let the “sprint” in the title mislead you. Most teams took it fairly easy, and it was even possible to top the leaderboard without any running between locations.

For more experienced players, Central Park Sprint doesn’t include the heftier puzzles you’d find in GGC’s flagship events, but it still packed in plenty of value and a diverse range of content. With a team of 2 experienced players, we finished in around 50 minutes. A full team of 4 experienced players wouldn’t make for any lesser of an experience, as long as you take it fairly easy. The marketed 1.5-2 hours of gameplay proved to be accurate for the majority of teams.

Although the puzzles in Central Park Sprint were on the lighter side, they were consistently thematic, clearly clued, and full of satisfying ahas. Our favorite interactions involved physical elements that extended the existing environment in novel and entertaining ways. In particular, we enjoyed some sonic stimulation, and the setup for a capstone keepsake was quite cool.

With no meta structure, the puzzles in Central Park Sprint were mostly modular. As such, teams visited the game’s earlier puzzles in different orders, effectively avoiding most traffic jams. We impressively only ran up into other teams at one station. Nonetheless, there was still a nice difficulty progression, with a couple of slightly more layered and flashy puzzles saved for the end.

I appreciate the risks that GGC imbues in their design process, as they often encourage players to take lightly subversive actions in public places without ever requiring anything illegal or unsafe. However, a cute interaction with an actor in Central Park Sprint would have highly benefited from a more unique visual identifier; while we found the correct person immediately, there was a nontrivial chance that we could have encountered someone else fitting the same overly general description in such a densely crowded public place. After all, New Yorkers are known to dress to impress. The thrill comes from the interaction itself, not from any uncertainty that there’s even a slight chance you’re putting a random stranger in an awkward position, especially with a vulnerable and potentially sexually-charged prompt.

GGC offered an optional add-on for Central Park Sprint of a prepackaged picnic lunch for either 2 or 4 players, available at the conclusion of the game. There was no vegetarian option so I was unable to partake myself, but my non-veg teammate remarked that it was a quality spread. I love the intention behind this — of making it easier for hungry players to stay in the park — yet I’d also love to see it be more integrated. Add a small puzzle to the picnic basket. Facilitate an icebreaker for picnicking teams to more directly interact with each other past the finish line. While far from necessary, these additions could even further elevate the overall experience.

The Great Gotham Challenge’s non-flagship events seem to fly under the radar, but both Central Park Sprint and Terminal Time Trial are highly thoughtful and creative offerings that are more than worthy ways to spend a summer afternoon with friends old and new.

Tips For Visiting

All members of your team should bring a fully charged phone, plenty of water, and shoes that you’re comfortable walking in.

Central Park Sprint runs August 3, August 17, and August 31, 2024.

Book your experience with the Central Park Sprint, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.