Category: Last Minute Escape

It might have been a bit of a dive, but much was hidden in its depths.

Location: Montclair, NJ

Date played: February 27, 2017

Team size: up to 8; we recommend 4-5

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: $100 per team during the week with additional costs for larger teams & $30.50 per person on weekends

Story & setting

It was 194-blah in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Our submarine was under attack and all of the personnel who actually knew how to operate the critical systems were incapacitated. It was up to our ragtag group of know-nothings to figure out how to operate the boat, sink a Japanese ship, and save our crewmen. The story didn’t make a lot of sense, but Last Minute Escape didn’t take the story too seriously either.

The set design had its up and downs. Everything was handmade and a little hacked together. Many individual interactions looked good, but the rooms themselves didn’t always feel cohesive or part of a submarine. A lot of it was clever… even when it wasn’t convincing.

The Submarine had a great logo.

Puzzles

Last Minute Escape truly shined in the puzzling . They assembled a challenging collection of team-oriented escape room puzzles.

Some puzzles were analog while others were tech-driven. Nearly every puzzle demanded multiple people to solve. This is a difficult to achieve and too often overlooked facet of escape room design that Last Minute Escape nailed.

Standouts

The Submarine was built for collaborative puzzling and it truly achieved that.

The puzzles were satisfying, challenging, and fun. Everyone on our team had at least one moment of triumph.

While the room escape didn’t always look amazing or make a ton of sense, Last Minute Escape used what they had to create some honestly triumphant moments.

Epiphany in puzzle design is a tough thing to create, especially in the escape room format. However, I found that The Submarine repeatedly achieved it. Early in the room escape we found so many things that simply didn’t make sense that I actually started off a little frustrated. As the game progressed, however, we started to make the connections. It felt so rewarding to solve these little mysteries that had originally made no sense whatsoever and then in a flash became incredibly clear.

Shortcomings

The Submarine’s soundtrack was loud enough that it interfered with the gameplay.

There were tons of details in The Submarine and managing them relied heavily on labeling, which wasn’t always clear; in one instance it simply wasn’t there.

We encountered a little bit of prop failure, which added a fair amount of confusion into the late-game experience.

In once section of the room escape, we needed to derive a series of answers and administer them all at once. Frequently, there was no way to verify them, short of the gamemaster hinting which one was incorrect. This didn’t present an issue for us, but I can easily imagine a number of scenarios where it could seriously hamper gameplay.

The story didn’t make much sense and there was no attempt to ground the game in any historical reality. The room escape was set on a nuclear sub (which didn’t exist in WWII) and the props were a hodgepodge of anachronistic naval/military items.

Should I play Last Minute Escape’s The Submarine?

The Submarine was fun, weird, and challenging. It was an energizing game for our experienced players. It offered a level of puzzling that we don’t often encounter and that puzzling was implemented with nuance and finesse.

For these same reasons, I do not recommend The Submarine for newbies. The emphasis on challenging puzzles that require careful observation and clever connections could lead to an especially frustrating experience for those who aren’t at least a little comfortable in an escape room environment. Additionally, the lack of focus on story and environmental design would make it more difficult for newbies to even see the brilliance of The Submarine, and there was a lot of brilliance.

Escape room enthusiasts: If you’re in it for the puzzling, I highly recommend you pay Last Minute Escape a visit and see how deep you can dive.

Book your hour with Last Minute Escape’s The Submarine, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Full disclosure: Last Minute Escape provided media discounted tickets for this game.

[At the time of this review, Last Minute Escape was called Exit Strategy.]

The Hotel Luxeva only rents rooms by the hour.

Location: Wayne, NJ

Date played: January 18, 2016

Team size: 2-8; we recommend 4-6

Price: $100 per room on weekdays, $30.50 per ticket on weekends

Theme & story

Hotel Luxeva was set in a 1980’s hotel room. We were agents in a techno-thriller at the tail end of the Cold War.

The puzzles stayed true to the hotel setting. The techno-thriller story was conceptually more engaging than the hotel setting, but the game focused its attention on the set rather than the story.

Wordy

Exit Strategy tried to work the story into wordy puzzles instead of making it the focus of the larger immersive experience.

This game included a few puzzles that required substantial focused reading. This type of puzzle diminished the tangible and interactive experience. It also caused bottlenecking.

Puzzles

The majority of the puzzles were designed around hotel-themed props, which was immersive.

However, Hotel Luxeva was designed such that we unlocked just one component of a variety of puzzles immediately and then continued to unlock additional components of the already started puzzles as the game unfolded. In this way, we spent considerable time attempting to solve puzzles before we had all the clues, but we had no way to know that.

It drained some of my fun.

My missed opportunity

I missed how much of this game unfolded because I was glued to half completed puzzles. Because our gamemaster continued to hint at these puzzles, I continued to fixate on them, figuring that they were necessary to push our game forward. However…

Our missed opportunity

We bypassed a few critical game elements because we managed to solve puzzles without deriving the entirety of the clues.

Thus we missed what were absolutely the two best puzzles in the game. When we saw them unfold in the walkthrough, we were disappointed that we missed them. These puzzles were too cool to be missable.

Their missed opportunity

Exit Strategy continued to impress us with video production. Their intro video set up the full story where the set focused on the hotel, and they have the best rules explanation video we’ve ever seen. It’s hilarious.

Video production is Exit Strategy’s greatest strength, and it would be great to see more of it melded into the game.

Hints & explanations

Our gamemaster delivered hints on a computer screen through an image that implied a type of decryption. Considering that some of our unsolved puzzles included large passages of text, we thought this too was a hint. It turned out that this was just a style choice, but it threw us way off.

Build quality

Before entering the room we were told something along the lines of, “be careful in the our room, the Hotel Luxeva is a premiere hotel, and should be handled with care.”

The reality was that it wasn’t a particularly upscale or beautiful room, but there was a fair number of flimsy components. One of our teammates pulled a piece of furniture apart by accident.

Should I play Exit Strategy’s Hotel Luxeva?

Escape rooms are ultimately about fun. Hotel Luxeva wasn’t a bad game, but it had more faults than we were expecting, and they diminished our fun.

Far too many set pieces were weakly constructed.

Far too few puzzles advanced the techno-thriller story.

Far too many puzzles required too much reading.

And we skipped the room’s greatest moments entirely by accident.

Much of what went wrong for us could be fixed, and not every player will be as bothered by these faults. However, when we consider our Exit Strategy experiences together, we recommend The Speakeasy over Hotel Luxeva.

[At the time of this review, Last Minute Escape was called Exit Strategy.]

With a new location, Exit Strategy’s sophomore effort is a massive improvement that isn’t without its faults.

Location: Wayne, New Jersey

Date played: August 22, 2015

Team size: up to 8; we recommend 6-8

Price: different weekday and weekend pricing structures

Theme & story

Within this speakeasy you must find evidence against an infamous crime boss. You have one hour to escape with the evidence to incriminate him.

This game is properly staged in a speakeasy, complete with all manner of typical drinking and gambling paraphernalia and decor. (It’s not all of the Prohibition era, but you’ll get the point).

The puzzles generally make use of these themed elements, some more cleverly than others. However, the puzzles themselves don’t elevate the players’ experience of the story, nor do they move a narrative forward.

Use of space

Exit Strategy has a lot of space to work with in their new location in Wayne, NJ and they use it well.

The game opened in what is designed to be the speakeasy entry way. After we unlocked the first door, we found ourselves in a multiple room saloon environment. Early in the game, we unlocked these other rooms, which gave us more puzzles and more clues. The game cleverly forces players to to move fluidly between the various rooms throughout the game.

It’s always fun to play a game that makes proper use of space.

Puzzle variety

All roads lead to a lock, but many of those roads have some interesting, more physically involved puzzles along the way.

One puzzle in particular takes a half-baked concept from Exit’s Strategy’s first room, The Senator’s Manor, and greatly improves upon it.

Hinting

Our gamemaster began feeding us hints on a screen almost as soon as we entered the main room of the speakeasy. In the first instance, we received a hint on a puzzle that had stumped a few people, but others hadn’t even looked at yet.

At no time in this game did our team slow down, spend a substantial amount of time without making any progress in the game, or actually request a hint. Yet we continued to receive hints. Our gamemaster may only have had video of us, but if there had been audio, it would have been very clear we wanted the hints to cease. David actually yelled “stop giving us hints” more than once.

We escaped with 15 minutes to spare, which was almost record time.

The accidental brute-force

David not-so-secretly loves to circumvent puzzles, but this game was the first time that he did it by accident.

One puzzle has a solution that is easy to derive in the wrong way. Unfortunately, the path designed to derive this solution is arguably the most interesting part of the game. It’s a fixable flaw, but a flaw nonetheless.

Final puzzle

We found the door key about 20 minutes into the game. The lock to the final puzzle was left open.

It took us a little while to realize it was the door key because we weren’t expecting to have found it while we still had a significant portion of the room left to solve. After confirming for ourselves (by unlocking that door) that it was, in fact, the key to our escape, and that we were already holding the “evidence” we needed to escape with, we proceeded to finish the game the right way, because we paid to be there and wanted the full experience.

Should I play Exit Strategy’s The Speakeasy?

This is Exit Strategy’s second game and it’s much stronger than their first.

In this game, they’ve elevated the design, set pieces, and overall theming.

They smartly brought back the best elements of their first game: physically fun puzzles and high video production quality.

This room far outshines their first game; they’ve made incredible strides in quality across the board. Don’t play The Senator’s Manor; do play The Speakeasy.

This is a good room for beginners; the staff will hold your hand. And it’s still a fun game for experienced players.

All of that being said, there is no excuse for a bad setup. Players get one shot at these games, and they deserve to have it set up correctly. Quality control is a must.

Nevertheless, we’re looking forward to Exit Strategy’s next move.

Book your hour with Exit Strategy’s The Speakeasy, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.