Room Escape Artist

Bring out your inner Buffy

Location: Zion, Illinois

Date Played: May 31, 2025

Team Size: 2-5; we recommend 3-4

Duration: 60 minutes

Price:  $42 per player

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: You have to step over a low threshold to access one area.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

Edge of Escape is a relatively new escape room by the creators of the Dungeon of Doom Haunted House in Zion, IL, which has been running for 29 years. Their experience really showed in the quality of their sets. The scenery, effects, and animatronics were all top-notch. They also know how to tell a story and build to a big finale!

Unfortunately, the room’s puzzle structure wasn’t as flawless as the set design. The physical puzzles themselves were, for the most part, well-built and fun, but they sometimes lacked appropriate cluing at critical intervals. Certain steps were not clear at all.

The most curious choice in The House of Specter was the gamemaster interface — in that there wasn’t one. The sets and story were incredibly immersive; there was a talking corpse in there with us. Yet hints were delivered by the person we met in the lobby talking over a PA, just as himself. So every gamemaster interaction was an abrupt interruption of the story.

For those who don’t like jump scares, there’s good news. While the game’s haunted house pedigree meant that it featured things like skeletons and vampires, it was more spooky than scary. If your kids enjoy “Goosebumps” books, they should have no problem in the The House of Specter.

Zion is right on the Illinois-Wisconsin border, roughly an hour from Milwaukee and an hour and a half from Chicago. Gurnee, IL, is about 20 minutes away, and Edge of Escape is worth the trip for scenery fans visiting other Northern Illinois and Milwaukee-area standout games. 

We recommend The House of Specter for people in the area who value immersiveness and set design, and who don’t mind above-average puzzles with sometimes frustrating cluing.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Scenery snobs
• Horror fans
• Any experience level, but best for players who don’t need lots of hints

Why play?

• Detailed, immersive sets
• Strong theming
• An incredibly satisfying finale

Story

We were members of a secret monster-hunting society tasked with finding and destroying the evil inside The House of Specter, using clues left behind by all of the society’s previous hunters, who had entered the house and never returned.

Setting

We entered a spooky churchyard, outside the gates of the legendarily evil House, filled with the remnants of previous attempts to get inside… and also this guy:

Gameplay

The Edge of Escape’s The House of Specter was a standard escape room with moderate difficulty.

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

Analysis

➕/➖ We’re not fans of runbooks, as they create bottlenecks and take us out of the immersion, since only one person can read it at a time. That said, the runbook in this game felt organic to the story and was appropriate to the theme. Additionally there was enough to do that one person helping via the run book worked decently well.

➕ The lighting and sound did a good job of providing feedback when we completed puzzles (or steps of puzzles)

➕/➖ One particular puzzle involved a fun mechanism we hadn’t seen before. However, the exact construction posed some ambiguities about exactly where things belonged.

➕ The finale was incredibly fun and brought out our inner vampire hunters.

➕ The electronic aspects of several puzzles were really interesting and added color to the experience.

➖ There was a baffling inconsistency in prop quality. For example, in a puzzle that involved matching symbols, one set of symbols was etched in brass, and the other “matching” set was hand-painted on a prop so sloppily that it was, at times, impossible to tell what a symbol was supposed to be.

➖ The gamemastering was intrusive, particularly given the immersiveness of the set. At best, hinting was of the “warmer/ colder” variety and, at worst, the hint just told us what to do. One player likened the experience to “a neighbor yelling at you over the fence that you’re mowing your yard wrong.” This wasn’t the fault of the gamemaster, as this seemed to be the way Edge of Escape does hinting.

➕ The walls in the final room were so. Freaking. Cool.

➖ There was a fantastic talking animatronic corpse. However, the corpse liked to monologue, and the clock didn’t stop while it was talking. This caused some stress as we neared the end of our hour and we needed it to get to the point already.

Tips For Visiting

• There was plenty of street parking right in front. (That may change in October when the haunt is running.)

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