There are two ways to look at Cartman’s Escape Room: as a South Park product and as an escape room.
As a South Park product, Cartman’s Escape Room is pretty good. The incorporation of animation, character voicing, and references from throughout South Park history were great. The writing wasn’t tight like an episode of the show, but it was a fun environment that will resonate with South Park fans.
As an escape room, Cartman’s Escape Room was an old-school game with some maintenance issues, logic leaps, and puzzles that felt a little too detached from the game’s narrative. Our gamemaster was regularly speaking up with unrequested hints that bridged the logic leap gaps… and honestly, we appreciated each of those unrequested hints… they all should have been incorporated into the fabric of the game.
Overall, this is a game for South Park fans who know their way around an escape room. Frankly, there are better escape rooms out there if you aren’t into the source material. Cartman’s Escape Room does more justice to South Park than it does escape rooms.
Who is this for?
South Park fans who know their way around an escape room
Why play?
The set faithfully recreated the South Park classroom
There were a couple of fantastic South Park moments
Story
Eric Cartman set up an escape room for his friends in the most diabolical place he could: school.
Escape the Room San Antonio’s Western Bank Heist looked gorgeous. It was a beautiful and detailed game space.
The experience, however, felt hollow. The gameplay wasn’t dynamic, logical, or interesting. On multiple occasions, this game was barely clued. In one instance, I considered changing the code on one of the locks because doing so would have fixed the worst puzzle in this game. All it would have taken was swapping two digits to something that actually made sense. I didn’t do it… but Escape The Room absolutely should.
Escape the Room San Antonio built an amazing stage for a dramatic heist. With minimal tweaks in puzzle design and gameplay, they could make this adventure truly outstanding.
In its current form, we can only recommend Western Bank Heist for its scenery. Our playthrough was irritating.
Who is this for?
Scenery snobs
Why play?
The gorgeous set
To see one of the silliest puzzle solutions that we’ve encountered in years
Story
Our gang saddled up to rob a bank.
Setting
Escape The Room’s Western Bank Heist had a fantastic look that struck our entire team the moment we set foot in the room. The dark wood, white paint, and gold embellishments felt both strange and right.
Additionally, Escape The Room had added a few new effects to modernize this game and they were a smart addition.
Gameplay
Escape the Room San Antonio’s Western Bank Heist was a standard escape room with a high level of difficulty.
The difficulty stemmed from unrefined puzzles.
Core gameplay revolved around searching and puzzling.
Analysis
➕ This holdup took place in a spacious and detailed bank set. With its substantial wooden set pieces, built into the architecture, it looked and felt like the stage for a bit of prairie mischief.
➖ Although the set looked great, it wasn’t bright enough for a search-and-puzzle game. We were encouraged to use our phones for flashlights which was fine, if out of place… but there really wasn’t a good reason for us to need flashlights of any kind in this game. The low contrast clues weren’t fun to find.
➖ All roads led to a 4-digit combination… even when a different digit structure would have made more sense. Each time we derived an answer, we had to try it in every available input, which shot any forward momentum.
➕ We enjoyed the few tangible puzzles that were built into the fixtures of the gamespace. These were mostly new puzzles that had been recently integrated into The Western Bank Heist.
➖ We tripped up repeatedly on unclued searching and red herrings.
➖ One puzzle required a hefty logic leap. We required multiple hints on what should have been a quick-hit puzzle. When we finally got the right answer, this puzzle’s solution was about 75% inane bullshit.
➖ Escape the Room San Antonio missed an obvious opportunity for an explosive and memorable moment.
➕ Despite
a few missed opportunities, Western Bank Heist went out with a bang.
➖ Still, as we skipped town, we felt intimately familiar with the space, but not the sense of adventure or satisfaction one would hope from successfully robbing a bank. We’d spent more energy poring over every nook and cranny than solving puzzles. The experience felt hollow.
Tips For Visiting
Escape the Room San Antonio is right off The San Antonio River Walk.
Book your hour with Escape the Room San Antonio’s Western Bank Heist, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.
As I entered Jurassic Escape, in my head I heard the voice of John Hammond say, “Welcome to Jurassic Park!” This escape room felt like it was heavily inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Escape The Room NYC largely nailed the aesthetic and vibe of the movie. This was straight down to the effects, including one of the most memorable moments in the movie.
As a kid, I loved that movie. I loved that book. I loved all things dinosaurs. I couldn’t wait to step into this world that I had so painstakingly tried to recreate with my toys in my parents’ basement. Did I mention that I was excited?
Did it play on that level?
Jurassic Escape was a mixed bag. Its highs soared and its lows were bafflingly disappointing. (How do you make shooting a gun the least intense moment in a puzzle game?) Jurassic Escape constantly shifted between an immersive dinosaur adventure and an average escape game.
In the end, I was thrilled that I got to play Jurassic Escape, but I couldn’t help feeling that this one could have and should have been a curve breaker.
Who is this for?
People who love dinosaurs (If you don’t… why?)
Adventure seekers
Puzzle lovers
Scenery snobs
Players with at least some experience
Why play?
Dinosaurs!
Some fantastic effects
Some brilliant setpieces
Dinosaurs!
Story
An evil corporation was cloning weaponized dinosaurs. We had to stop them.
We began our adventure in the dinosaur pens. This set looked fantastic. It was a few animatronics away from feeling like it could have belonged in a Universal theme park.
Late game, we found ourselves in the less inspiring laboratory, which looked a step or two above your standard white-walled lab escape room.
Gameplay
Escape the Room NYC’s Jurassic Escape was a standard escape room with a higher level of difficulty.
Core gameplay revolved around searching and puzzling.
Analysis
➕ The initial set was especially cool. This was exactly what I’d wanted to see in a JurassicPark-inspired escape room.
➕ Escape The Room built some phenomenal effects into Jurassic Escape. We loved one absolutely amazing and oh-so-memorable moment.
➕ One puzzle directly referenced Jurassic Park. I saw it coming before I even entered the game. I was plenty happy to see it there.
➖ Jurassic Escape had some rough bottleneck puzzles that conflicted with the intense adventure theme. These puzzles stopped all forward progress. While this could be fine in some themes, it didn’t feel natural in Jurassic Escape.
➕ At its best, Jurassic Escape offered thematic puzzles that carried the narrative forward and instilled a sense of adventure.
➖ An early challenge featuring a gun was boring and lacked adequate direction. There was no reason for this to be anything but a quick, intense, and cool moment. It was instead a momentum-annihilating dose of tedium. If Escape The Room NYC only changes one thing about this game, please let it be this.
➕ Mid-game, Escape The Room NYC ratcheted up the intensity and really made Jurassic Escape roar.
➖ Escape the Room NYC never paid off the intensity of the theme or their best moments. When we won, the game ended as if we had found the door key. They forgot to truly end our story… and there was an opportunity to deliver an impactful exit.
❓ The featured dinosaurs in Jurassic Escape were from the late Cretaceous Period. [Pushes glasses up.]
Tips For Visiting
Escape the Room NYC is easily accessible by subway.
Clock Tower is one of the best games with locations in Dallas, New York City and Boston. Here are our other recommendations for great escape rooms in Dallas and New York City.
Don’t fritter and waste this hour in an off-hand way.
Clock Tower was a steam-punkish adventure to correct time.
The escape room took place in a laboratory called the Clock Tower, home to an eccentric keeper of time. The space included different mechanisms for altering and experiencing time. These were the crux of both the set and the puzzles.
Puzzles
The puzzles in Clock Tower were born of the incredible environment. The set pieces themselves were the puzzles.
Clock Tower’s puzzles ran the gamut of mechanical, observational, mathematical (nothing brutal), auditory, logical, and at one point, even “magical.” Multiple puzzles involved clocks, but with dramatically varied approaches. These different puzzle types all included tactile components.
Standouts
Clock Tower transported us not just through time, but into a space so unlike the midtown building that houses Escape the Room NYC. The room was composed of larger set pieces that contributed to a cohesive environment. Each set piece was exciting, beautiful, and intricate, but not distracting (mostly).
More importantly, the puzzling existed through the set. We explored, fiddled, manipulated, and even constructed parts of this set as we solved the puzzles. This made the puzzling that much more dynamic.
Many of the puzzles in Clock Tower were tech-driven, but the tech driving these interactions varied enormously and frequently felt invisible.
Through a combination of set, puzzles, and tech, Clock Tower delivered multiple cinematic moments. Each one delighted us.
Clock Tower included multiple puzzles we’ve never seen before. This wasn’t limited to different takes on familiar concepts. Clock Tower forced us to think of new ideas.
Clock Tower demonstrated that an escape room can be seriously challenging and still fair.
Shortcomings
The initial gamespace bottlenecked, both in physical space and gameplay. Clock Tower required a large team, but it initially couldn’t involve the full group.
Two of the early puzzles felt too similar, even though they ended up being quite different. This created confusion about whether they were standalone puzzles or somehow intertwined. It lead us needlessly off track for a bit.
While certainly both challenging and fair, in a few instances, Clock Tower would benefit from a little more clueing within the game. When we received hints from our gamemaster, they were always additional indirect clues; we would have liked to uncover most of those details ourselves within the environment.
Most of the puzzles in Clock Tower furthered our time-centric mission, but one seemed entirely out of place. It was a good puzzle, but we didn’t understand why it belonged.
Should I play Escape the Room NYC’s Clock Tower?
Clock Tower is an ideal game for escape room enthusiasts. It had a gorgeous set, integrated and tactile puzzles, and it will still be exciting and challenging even for seasoned players.
Very experienced teams will be happier in slightly smaller groups, if they can finagle such a booking, as there was some bottlenecking that left folks hanging and unable to help puzzle. We recommend that new players play at least a few other escape rooms first before booking Clock Tower.
With Clock Tower, Escape the Room NYC has nailed so much of what makes escape rooms exhilarating, from the interactive puzzling to the cinematic moments.
While they can continue to improve narrative integration so that all the puzzles feel natural in the space and deliver more story arc, they are making strides in that direction.
When the doors out of Clock Tower opened up, we felt that we had truly righted time and earned that victory in a fun little world hidden in Midtown Manhattan. That’s what escape rooms are about.
While exploring a deserted island with our friends we happened upon an old diesel submarine. We climbed aboard the boat and found ourselves locked in and descending. We had an hour’s worth of oxygen left to figure out how to surface the sub and save ourselves.
The set looked fantastic. The entirely custom construction blew away older Escape The Room NYC sets. The shape of the room, the doors, and the manner in which they made us feel like there was a world outside of the room was superb.
Puzzles
Even with the impressive set, the puzzling remained front and center.
The early puzzling consisted of fairly standard but well-executed escape room-style puzzles. With the late game puzzles, we moved through a story-driven adventure.
The puzzles kept most of our large team engaged at any given point throughout the room escape.
Submarine focused more on exploration and discovery than on scavenging through the set.
Standouts
The set was exceptional. When I had some downtime in the middle of the game while my teammates puzzled, I wandered around taking it all in. There were tons of dials, buttons, and gauges that were merely part of the set. While upon an initial glance I had internally freaked out because it seemed that the scenery overload could lead to confusion, it was actually easy to tell the important controls from the unimportant ones.
The puzzling was good fun. The solutions felt rewarding. We could witness the results of our progress as we moved through the room escape.
There were some great puzzles, expertly crafted to require the involvement of multiple players.
One recurring task was both compelling and kind of annoying; it was deliberate and it worked well in spite of its repetitious nature.
While trapped in the Submarine we actually felt like there was an exterior world. Brilliant.
Shortcomings
We experienced a major technical malfunction: many of the excellent puzzles lacked feedback. We solved at least two of them purely by lucky timing. In this tech-driven adventure, feedback is crucial and should be checked with every reset.
Much of the second half of Submarine followed a narrative arc where the puzzle solutions furthered the story… except for one puzzle that shifted back to non-narrative “escape room logic.” Had this puzzle been in an escape room without a narrative, or even appeared before the story had kicked in, it would have been fine. In this case, it felt out of place and strangely disappointing.
That same puzzle centered on a prop that felt cheap and out of place in the otherwise gorgeous set. There was one other prop that felt like it had been carried over from an older escape room and didn’t belong in this artfully designed and constructed world.
There was some 3D modeling that could have looked a bit more compelling, especially in comparison to the set’s beauty.
Should I play Escape The Room NYC’s Submarine?
Submarine introduced the next level of set and puzzle design from New York City’s first escape room company.
After our most recent experiences at Escape the Room NYC, we had started to count them out. They might have been first, but newer players had surpassed them. With Submarine, Escape the Room NYC is back in the picture and we welcome this return to form.
If you enjoy puzzles, teamwork, adventure, and how these can come together to serve a purpose, in a craft so unlike a room in the Manhattan building you entered from the street, I recommend Submarine.
This will be a challenging escape room for newer players, but it is well designed and conquerable at all experience levels.
Bring a full team, I wouldn’t recommend taking this plunge with strangers.
