Room Escape Artist

Three for the price of one

Location: Austin, TX

Date Played: July 18, 2025

Team Size: 4-12; we recommend 4-8

Duration: 60 minutes, divided into three 20-minute experiences

Price:  $38 per player

Ticketing: Private

Game Breakage: Yes – Our game timed out 13 minutes early. We were allowed to replay the last section of the game.

Accessibility Consideration: None that we were aware of

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] We think each room had an unlocked door, but we can’t be entirely sure.

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

I’ve never left a room feeling as discombobulated as I did after playing The Dreams. Whether by design or accident, it defied what I expect from escape rooms in both ingenious and disastrous ways. I don’t know whether to call it a work of art or a trainwreck, but I haven’t played anything else like it in Texas, and I won’t soon forget it. It’s worth a look for the right audience.

From the get-go, it was smackingly obvious that this room was different. The Dreams appeared to be a pipelined experience that consisted of three 20-minute mini-rooms in forced succession, automatically ushering players forward regardless of success and then resetting the clock. The website offered bookings every 40 minutes, suggesting that a new team could start in the first room while the previous team completes the last. The vast majority of resets were handled via an iPad.

In this context, every moment and action felt high-stakes and infused with adrenaline. Additionally, the puzzles were designed to require multiple attempts, contributing to the pressure. No amount of previous experience could fast-track our efforts in many cases; we actually had to learn new skills within these timebound boxes. And woe to anyone who tried these puzzles on their own; they seemed designed to defy the capacities of individual memory and/ or patience. The result was an intense gauntlet of collaborative exercises that leveled the playing field among experience levels, a rare find for sure.

Unfortunately, this ingenious puzzle design and gameflow was marred by a myriad of implementation issues that, in less interesting contexts, would feel unforgivable. Most notably, our 20-minute adventures mistakenly ended early at least once and possibly twice, forcing a mid-game reset and some repeated puzzling. Multiple puzzles seemed to complete at random times after we repeated the exact same actions. The soundscape was a cacophony of various sound effects and clues executing simultaneously, and heaven forbid you touch anything while listening to a hint.

So would I recommend The Dreams? My rational brain says no, I must protect people from the chaos, noise, trial-and-error, and ever-present threat of malfunction. But I must say, over the course of our visit to 4 Dreams Escape Game, I saw three large teams of people leaving this room bubbling over with laughter and excited conversation, and my little quartet of varying experience levels followed suit ourselves. It says something that, for all the confusing and frustrating things that happened in that hour, we all STILL had a good time. If 4 Dreams Escape Game can work out the perceived unreliability of its technology, it would unquestionably have something special on its hands.

Who is this for?

• Puzzle lovers
• Any experience level
• Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle

Why play?

• For a adrenaline-filled challenge that tests skills you didn’t know you had

Story

We found ourselves trapped in a series of disjoint fever dreams with the sole goal of waking up.

Setting

Our dream marathon began in a cartoonish garden that evoked Alice in Wonderland, continued through a witchy, fungus-infected cabin, and ended in a relatively sterile inventor’s lab. The first two locations felt convincingly fantastical and dreamlike, but the lab was dull and anticlimactic in comparison.

Gameplay

4 Dreams Escape Game’s The Dreams was an atypical gauntlet of three short escape rooms, each with a 20-minute clock. The game ushers players forward to the next room regardless of their success with the previous experience and resets the clock. The end result was a high level of difficulty.

Gameplay revolved around dexterity, memory, speed, following instructions, and revising strategy. A majority of the puzzles required multiple players.

Analysis

➕ The 20-minute/ 3 room design maintained a high level of energy and pressure throughout and ensured that we got to attempt all the puzzles and spaces.

➕ The puzzles felt more like challenging mini-games than typical escape room puzzles. They spanned a variety of skill sets and often benefited from multiple players. A couple riffed on simple gaming apps for a pleasant bout of nostalgia.

➕/➖ The theming included some elaborate set pieces and fun décor elements, but the overall ambience degraded from room to room. We went from a cartoonishly playful forest to some cool things placed squarely in a mid-century house.

➕/➖ Each puzzle had a visual indicator to communicate when it was ready to play and when it was complete. In many cases, this was a helpful focusing mechanism that also enhanced the dopamine hit when completing a puzzle. However, a couple of times the indicator color was misleading and/ or interfered with the actual color-based part of the problem-solving.

➖ The audio in this room was an overwhelming combination of instructions, clues, feedback, time updates, and hints with no guardrails to prevent triggering these features simultaneously. This led to significant audio interference, repeatedly obscuring each form of information at critical times.

➖ One puzzle repeatedly triggered with a significant object in the wrong position, leading to nonsense and frustration while we waited many seconds each time to try again.

➖ The final puzzle was tedious, possibly self-contradicting, and generally anticlimactic compared to so many other exciting activities that we had completed.

➖ No one on our team heard a 5-minute warning in the second room or either a 10- or 5-minute warning in the last room, and the gamemaster confirmed that our session timed out early for unknown reasons. They kindly allowed us to replay the puzzles we missed out on, but the disruption undermined the adrenaline that the game seemed designed to evoke.

➕ The novelty and intense collaboration within this experience left a powerful impression.

Tips For Visiting

• Parking is available in the alleyway behind the building. The alleyway has a narrow entrance and is not well-marked.

Book your hour with 4 Dreams Escape Game The Dreams, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.