Vampire Hunter Room was a puzzle-driven escape room. With a fairly standard study-like set, and dim lighting, the intrigue was in the puzzles. These offered a number of fun solves.
If you’re in the area and looking for puzzles over environment, we recommend stopping by.
Who is this for?
Puzzle lovers
Any experience level
Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle
Why play?
Some cool puzzles
Story
Antoine Devillier, an ancient, wealthy, and powerful vampire, had but one weakness: the stake of Van Helsing. Devillier had acquired and hid his one weakness away. Our plucky band of vampire hunters set out to find the legendary weapon and give it a new home in Devillier’s chest.
Setting
Vampire Hunter Room was slightly dim and study-like. The initial set was functional, but lacked excitement and polish. The escape room gave way to a more interesting set later in the adventure.
Gameplay
Clue Carré’s Vampire Hunter Room was a standard escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.
Core gameplay revolved around searching, puzzling, and making connections.
Analysis
+ Vampire Hunter Room was a puzzle-driven escape room. It had a lot of content. We enjoyed many of the puzzles.
– The decor was standard study fare with a vampiric twist. It was not particularly inspiring.
– Vampire Hunter Room was unnecessarily dim. While the dim lighting provided some ambiance, it made solving puzzles more frustrating than they should have been. The trade-off didn’t seem worth it.
+ We enjoyed how Clue Carré wove the bloodlines into the escape room.
? Vampire Hunter Room was a solid, themed escape room, but nothing more. We hope that Clue Carré can build on this in the future to develop a cohesive world of puzzles, set, and story.
+ Vampire Hunter Room came to a pointed conclusion. It was predictable, yet enjoyable.
The second most fun you can have in a coat closet.
Location: New Orleans, LA
Date Played: June 22, 2018
Team size: 2-8; we recommend 4-6
Duration: 60 minutes
Price: $28 per ticket
Ticketing: Public
REA Reaction
The Carnival Heist was a split-team escape room with an unusual twist. We’re torn between deeply enjoying a lot of what Clue Carré created and feeling frustrated by some of the design decisions that made it interesting.
The Carnival Heist offered interesting puzzles. Bring the right team for a communication-heavy escape room and be mindful that if something appears off, that might be by design.
If you’re in the area and looking for something that plays a bit differently, there is a crown here just waiting for you to steal it.
Who is this for?
Puzzle lovers
Players with at least some experience
Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle
Why play?
Unusual take on split-team escape rooms
Interesting set of puzzles
Fun final sequence
Story
The priceless King’s Crown was on display at the Vieux Carré Art Gallery during Carnival. With a one hour gap in the viewing schedule, our crew needed to sneak into the gallery and steal the work of art.
Setting
The Carnival Heist had a split start whereby half of the group entered the art gallery’s employee break room and the other half entered the coat check room. We eventually converged into the gallery itself.
The break room looked like a break room and the coat check looked like a coat closet. They weren’t overwhelmingly impressive locations, but they did look right. The gallery was a bit more impressive, merging the art gallery aesthetic with a Mardi Gras color palette.
Gameplay
Clue Carré’s The Carnival Heist was a split-team escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.
Core gameplay revolved around communication, deduction, and puzzling.
Analysis
+ The Carnival Heist offered serious deduction and logic challenges.
+ We enjoyed the repurposing of a small device for a fun reveal.
– One group encountered an order preservation puzzle, which was a problem because we didn’t know until it was too late.
+/- The coat check and break room looked fine and reasonably accurate, but they weren’t exciting locations.
+ When we entered the two different spaces, each team was presented with an interesting mini escape room with unique goals.
– We eventually stalled forward progress due to an unusual split-team implementation. While we intellectually appreciate this unorthodox structure, we didn’t enjoy it in the moment. It was clued – and really hammered in – but especially difficult to interpret in the moment. Once we misunderstood the intent, there was no way to self-correct without gamemaster intervention. This plagued the different groups for a good portion of the split-team part of the experience.
? We liked the idea that once one group entered the gallery, they could quickly let the other group in as well. However, in the moment, we didn’t realize we had this capability. It didn’t matter for us, but we suggest additional cluing in the event that one team is far behind the other.
+ The gallery reveals upped the energy level in the room.
Escape My Room reliably provides unusual escape room experiences; Smugglers Den was no exception. It began in as a fairly typical escape room and then transitioned us into darkness, where we spent the rest of the game puzzling by touch.
Smugglers Den was a game of extreme tradeoffs. We lost the beautiful Escape My Room aesthetic and the DeLaporte family narrative. We gained a private, small-team experience with a different approach to puzzling and a variety of new sensory inputs.
If puzzling in pure darkness sounds like a welcome adventure and challenge, this is one fine example of the niche pitch-black genre. If you’re thinking, “darkness is a big nope” then you should trust that instinct, but do so knowing that this was a safe, horror-free escape room.
Who is this for?
Adventure seekers
Puzzle lovers
Players with at least some experience
Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle
Why play?
A great opening puzzle sequence
The challenge and intrigue of a dark escape room
An unusual final puzzle
Story
The DeLaporte family was in financial dire straits and facing the reality that they might have to sell their estate. As a last-ditch effort to raise funding they had hired our team to investigate their old wine cellar for any valuables left behind by Silver Dollar Sam, a notorious smuggler who, according to family legend, had used the cellar for running his illicit goods.
Setting
Smugglers Den was an unusual game in Escape My Room’s universe. We began in the DeLaportes’ wine cellar, which felt right at home in… their home. It was a beautiful, detailed, and weathered space filled with appropriate props.
After solving our way through the wine cellar, we entered a dark space for the remaining two-thirds of the game.
In game photo: We’re just gonna keep making this joke until we stop snickering at it.
Gameplay
Escape My Room’s Smugglers Den was an escape room played largely in darkness, with a higher level of difficulty.
Core gameplay revolved around searching, puzzling, building understanding of the dark space, making connections, and communicating.
In addition to escaping, we were playing for a score. There were a number of over sized silver dollars hidden throughout the gamespace. (We found all but one of them.)
Analysis
+ The wine cellar moved from on-ramp to complex puzzling. It gave us a glass of the kind of experience that Escape My Room typically presents… but not a full bottle.
+ There were a lot of nifty boxes to unlock… which doesn’t mean what you think it means.
+ The puzzles set in darkness forced us to adapt our methods of exploration and communication. This was among the finest dark rooms that we’ve encountered.
– Light bled through the edge of a door. While exits and signage are important, as our eyes adjusted this light bleed eventually let us sort of see each other, diminishing the effect of the darkness.
+/- Smugglers Den felt light dark on content. That said, it had a lot of puzzles for a dark escape room. Perspective played a big role in puzzle satisfaction.
? The search for coins forced us to explore the dark space thoroughly. The puzzles, however, asked us to do the same. We were torn on how much the coins added to the experience beyond the justification of the narrative.
– Escape My Room is the DeLaporte Estate, a beautiful, unusual, designed world. Smugglers Den didn’t fully belong to this world. The detailing and character of Escape My Room’s work comes in large part from the visuals that were essentially absent in this game. We missed the magic of the Escape My Room aesthetic.
– When the game ended, the lights came back on and we saw the unthemed puzzle room that we had been locked within. It really shattered the magic. We wished we would have exited back into the world of the DeLaportes and let the darkness of Smugglers Den remain a mystery.
– At 45 minutes and with a much smaller gamespace and far less set design, Smugglers Den was priced the same as Escape My Room’s longer and more detailed games. This presented a problem that’s not easily solvable. If they were to lower the price, this game for more advanced players would attract more newbies, but as fun as it was, it didn’t feel like the same value as the much more grand Inventor’s Attic.
+ The final puzzle came together unexpectedly. This was absolutely one of the high points of Smugglers Den.
+ Smugglers Den was a ton of fun. It was dark, but not at all scary. It was playful, strange, and exciting.
Tips for Visiting
There is so much amazing cuisine in the neighborhood. We highly recommend Mother’s and Cochon.
All players must be comfortable in darkness and able to crawl a short distance.
Escape, Immerse, Explore New Orleans collected 42 people from 17 states, who traveled 72,000 miles, to ride 2 buses and played a total of 63 games across southeastern Louisiana.
The player satisfaction surveys showed an overwhelmingly positive response. The attendees loved the games and one another.
We had players on the tour who had crossed the 400-game threshold. We also had a number of folks who had previously visited fewer than 10 escape rooms and literally doubled their play-count on the trip.
Lisa’s Bus
We’ve always tried to help players find the escape rooms that fit their taste, skill, play style, and comfort level. After running two escape room tours, we are confident that we’re onto something.
David’s Bus
The escape room player community is growing and it isn’t monolithic. This diverse group of people really are attracted to different things in escape rooms.
We featured a wide variety of games ranging from the more traditional escape rooms of Clue Carré, to the immersive world of Escape My Room, to the beautifully executed games of Rise, to the dumbfounding set design of 13th Gate.
Each company offered something different. Each also offered at least one game that topped someone’s list as their very favorite game of the tour.
The Tour featured 13th Gate’s Cutthroat Cavern, a game that many would consider a curve-breaker. In a lot of ways, it was. Nearly half of the players reported it as their favorite game of the tour. That sentiment, however, was not universal.
This is no knock against 13th Gate. It’s a testament to how much room there is to create unique experiences that can be loved by different people for different reasons.
Of the 14 escape rooms featured on the tour, each of these 6 topped at least one player’s list:
Exactly half the featured games rose to the top as favorites. There isn’t one best way to create an escape room!
Creating Community
It was heartwarming to see these folks come together to play games, set records, have fun, share stories of favorite games, and laugh over terrible escape room experiences.
The games are fun, but for us, escape rooms are about the people that we share them with.
We met so many incredible people with different backgrounds, stories, experiences, and other interests.
The Experiment Continues
We’re working on what comes next. Where else can we go? What games will we showcase? What other formats can we tinker with to bring this community together?
The Escape Immerse Explore Tours of New York and New Orleans were both massive experiments… albeit experiments that Lisa and I obsessively thought through, from game line up, to transportation, to the puzzle that we hid in the welcome information and sealed in wax… but it was still mad science.
We thank all of those who popped the stopper off of the Erlenmeyer flask and joined us in drinking this crazy concoction.
Through this we’ve learned so much about player behavior and running events. We have many more ideas for how to deliver an even better experience.
We had the best weekend with all of y’all and we cannot wait to do it again.
If you were not able to attend New York or New Orleans and you would like to receive an email announcement for the next tour, please contact us.
