Room Escape Artist

Pardon me

Location:  Brussels, Belgium

Date Played: March 4, 2025

Team Size: 3-6; we recommend 3-4

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: 135€ for 3 players to 180€ for 6 players

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: One player must enter a small space

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

As an American in 2025, it’s a strange time to be visiting the White House, even just in escape room form. Escape Rush’s The White House presented a detailed 70% scale replica of the Oval Office, and while I’ve never visited the real thing, this meticulously constructed copy was utterly immersive in its realism.

Escape rooms often allow us to escape to fantastical alternate realities, but they can also help us to discover wonder in the mundane, and The White House excelled in doing just that. While the Oval Office is perhaps too iconic to be truly mundane, it’s ultimately just a sterile government room that happens to be a round shape. At its strongest, the gameplay in The White House led us to interact with small details in this environment in unexpected and exciting ways.

At times, especially in the game’s opening act, the gameplay could have leaned even further into its Culper Ring secret society framing to make for a more compelling whole. Rooting the game world in the present — including updating the Oval Office to include multiple portraits of Donald Trump — felt unnecessary, and the environments depicted could have strayed even further from their real-life counterparts to great effect.

The White House provided a smooth introduction to Escape Rush’s lineup of scenery-centric escape experiences, though without a doubt, Botanist Manor remains Escape Rush’s star attraction. But for teams seeking a fun warmup game before Botanist Manor, or for newer players looking for a more standard introduction to escape rooms, The White House would make a great addition to your itinerary.

Who is this for?

• Scenery snobs
• Any experience level

Why play?

• A detailed reproduction of an iconic environment

Story

We snuck into the White House in order to retrieve an invaluable object hidden by the Culper Ring, a secret society founded by George Washington.

Setting

The White House began behind the scenes in a boiler room before proceeding into the Oval Office of the White House. The environment was clean and detailed, and it looked exactly like the actual Oval Office.

Gameplay

Escape Rush’s The White House was a standard escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around searching, solving puzzles, and making connections.

Analysis

➕ Top-notch set design throughout The White House brought an iconic setting to life with an impressive level of realism. There was an effective contrast between grungy and bureaucratic spaces.

➕/➖ A satisfying and sizable tactile interface was underdesigned as a tedious guess-and-check memory game.

➕/❓ A custom song was an absolute bop. This song’s cluing was more than sufficient on its own, making additional written cluing somewhat redundant. While I understand the desire to present information in multiple ways for different players, the game could lean into its more creative theming with something like liner notes.

➕ Multiple input mechanisms led us to interact with the environment in unique and unexpected ways.

➖ We had to press a button to return to a previous space, which we’d falsely assumed was an emergency exit button. We hadn’t explicitly been told not to press this type of button in The White House…. but it didn’t look like part of the game, and we’d been told not to press these exact buttons in so many other escape rooms in the region. We wished this door had simply not locked behind us.

➕ A musical puzzle with a creative input was awesome. It actually made me feel a bit patriotic… which is saying something given the current political climate in the United States.

➖ The ending was anticlimactic. Upon obtaining the object of our search, we were left with nothing to do as we waited for the gamemaster to come meet us in the room.

➕/➖The White House referenced the Culper Ring, an actual Revolutionary War era spy network. I appreciated this nod to real history, and I would have loved to see it play an even more prominent role in the game’s narrative and gameplay.

Tips For Visiting

• The White House is playable in French or English.

Book your hour with Escape Rush’s The White House, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: Escape Rush provided a complimentary game.