Room Escape Artist

A split personality

Location: Houston, TX

Date Played: July 6, 2025

Team Size: 3-6; we recommend 4

Duration: 90 minutes

Price:  $37 per player

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: None

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

The Return: Tides and Tribes was a bit like a homemade cookie: lovingly crafted, full of tasty morsels, but a bit rugged around the edges. It was a satisfying treat without pretending perfection, and one might reasonably wonder about some of its oddities.

This experience combined two rooms that can be booked separately, which made sense in some ways but not others. The two acts had drastically different personalities, aesthetics, and puzzling strategies, enabling them to stand alone without much issue. The narrative adequately explained the transition between these paradigms, though the second act didn’t entirely fulfill the expectations of the first. Regardless, as far as we could tell, the differences between combining the rooms vs. playing them separately were in the time allowed and price: we had 90 minutes for the combined experience at $37 per player, whereas separately players get 60 minutes per act but pay $33 for each room. We had very little difficulty completing the combined experience in under 90 minutes, so I don’t believe experienced teams have anything to gain from booking the rooms separately.

The puzzles in this game stood out much more than the atmosphere. The first act leaned very heavily into communication and split-information activities, moreso than most other rooms I’ve played. The second act reversed this dynamic with very dense puzzling in a small shared space. Throughout both parts, the puzzles consistently built upon common escape room tropes by adding layers that increased challenge and interest. We often thought we knew where a puzzle was leading only to find extra complexity, which was delightful. This construction lent itself well to our team of mixed experience levels, introducing newer players to repeating patterns while enabling everyone to contribute to the novel portions.

The room’s most notable flaw was in under-supporting its more complex puzzles in the second act. Multi-layered puzzles lacked intermediate feedback or cluing to organize our hypotheses, to an extent that we completed some component tasks out of order to the detriment of our understanding. The tasks were individually reasonable but could use additional scaffolding to help teams focus on their goals in the right order. In its current state, the exploration felt more open-ended than it actually was.

This was an endearing game. If you’re a fan of split-info scenarios or homegrown gems, this is worth considering if you’re in Houston.

Who is this for?

• Puzzle lovers
• Any experience level
• Expert communicators

Why play?

• For an extensive split-info communication challenge

Story

A precious totem of the Umbatu tribe had been stolen and locked away on an ocean liner. It was our job to find the totem and return it to its place among the Umbatu people.

Setting

As a double escape room that can be played as one continuous game or two separate experiences, The Return: Tides and Tribes spanned two distinct settings.

At first, we found ourselves split apart and locked in adjacent storage compartments, ostensibly in an ocean liner but visually in something more like a warehouse. Oddly, the “tides” half of this game never touched the sea, leaving us to imagine our own foghorns and motion sickness.

The “return” half of the game explored a jungly cube of space covered in symbols and periodically inundated with chants, storytelling, and other audio enhancements. This set was richer than the ocean liner but had a more homemade appearance.

Gameplay

Exit Lab Houston’s The Return: Tides and Tribes was a double escape room with a moderately high level of difficulty stemming from some of its puzzle implementations.

Gameplay consisted of split info communication, observation, making connections, decoding, and logic.

This game can be booked as one 90-minute experience or two hour-long experiences. The puzzles and set are the same in either scenario, so the only reason to book this as two rooms is to lower the difficulty level by securing more time. We found the combined experience to be entirely approachable for experienced players, but can see how newer players might struggle.

Analysis

➕ Several puzzles incorporated clever enhancements of common escape room tropes.

➕ The game featured an unusually hefty split-team segment that tested communication well and was fairly balanced between groups.

❓ The build quality was noticeably home-made, which may be endearing to some and off-putting to others. The set didn’t detract from the puzzling, but it was humble, and set-driven aficionados will notice.

➕/➖ The game included several clever multilayered puzzles that felt rewarding to untangle. However, the layers often lacked feedback, making it difficult to troubleshoot incorrect solutions.

➕ A small physical space worked well as its own puzzle, forcing us to strategize about how to manage our materials.

➖ In the second act, audio segments played an ambiguous role in the puzzling. We couldn’t re-trigger some information that later proved important, leading us to doubt the value of other audio clips.

➖ Also in the second act, lock mapping was subpar. We often discovered numeric codes that could serve multiple locks.

➖ We solved some endgame puzzles out of sequence, leading to a muddled finale with multiple competing audio fragments.

➕/➖ This design of combining two drastically different rooms into one experience was interesting to play and unique among the rooms we’ve played in Texas. We appreciated the notable variety in both set and puzzling strategy. That said, there was opportunity to connect the rooms together more strongly by embedding the narrative more clearly, investing more in the physical transition, and/ or designing an aesthetic through-line between the sets. The story was believable, but it was easy to lose track of it within the game.

Tips For Visiting

• The Return: Tides and Tribes is a combination of two rooms that you can book separately. If you only care about playing the split-information portion of the experience, book The Return: Ocean Heist. If you’re more intrigued by lots of puzzles in a small space, book The Return: Tribal Rites. That said, we recommend playing the combined game.
• There is a parking lot.

Book your hour with Escape Lab Houston’s The Return: Tides and Tribes, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.