Arcadia is located in front of Chinook Centre, which is really convenient. The lobby looked dark, almost like an underground office. The staff was friendly and professional—almost too professional. We attempted to engage in a conversation a few times but the crew behind the desk was shy. Overall, they did what they needed to and provided standard customer service.

9 is a pretty standard “good, but not great” score, for the reasons Mr. P pointed out above. What I really liked was how our game master gave hints – slight nudges to start, but if it wasn’t enough for us, then she would give us a little bit more until it clicked for us.

As soon as we walked in, we were overwhelmed by the amount of locked items that we needed to open. We were lost for the first few minutes because there was no obvious start. There were things to be found, riddles to be answered, and puzzles to be solved. Whenever you have a lot to do all at once, it’s always tricky because you don’t know what you can and can’t do. However, once we got going, we found a nice rhythm in our pace.

We found the puzzles to be on the upper-end of the difficulty scale not only because of the amount we had to do, but also because we had never seen most of them before (that’s plus points for innovativeness). There were only two of us, and we had a lot to do.

Like Paulie said, there are LOTS of things to do in this room – “overwhelming” is a good word for it. Make sure to work with your team to find and connect the different things you find in the room to help you get going.

What I really liked about the puzzles in this room is that they used different kinds of locks that we had never seen before! Usually, we can find clues that have, for example, 3 numbers on them that we can connect to a 3-number lock. But because the locks were different here, we had to think a little bit differently to make the clue-lock connections.

There is a certain sense of elegance to this room. Everything was neatly decorated, and the props looked and felt expensive. However, I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but I didn’t find it to be convincingly like a museum. Perhaps it was the flooring or the wall paint, or the windows with curtains. I still felt very much like being in an escape room.

This was a very clean room that was obviously meticulously put together. It was definitely reminiscent of a museum, which means they hit the nail on the head with the décor here! The room is also quite spacious, which gives your group some room to move around.

I felt immersed in the room because of the momentum that we had solving the puzzles. However, the actual physical environment took me out of immersion every once in a while. It was brightly lit (at one point, there was sunlight coming in from the outside) and the music made me feel lethargic.

There were some puzzles that needed a lot of brainpower to solve (the ones that kind of go “If X is A, but Y cannot be B, C, D, then what is Z?”), so those kept me engaged for a while. Otherwise, I think I was pretty aware that it was an escape room.

Experiencing an “adventure room” wasn’t anything different from doing a traditional escape room. While it’s true that the main objective is to get an object within the given amount of time (and not just escape), the overall objective is still to complete all the puzzles in the room which is what escape rooms are about anyway.

The more specific theme for this room involves being in a heist. In that regard, the room was good but not great. The term “heist” implies fast-paced, non-stop action. I think this is hard to accomplish because the majority of time spent in escape rooms is thinking. There’s so much downtime that “heist” is almost difficult to accomplish.

Another theme here involves Egyptian ruins, on which they did a great job. All the puzzles and riddles were clever while still being thematically loyal.

I think this room does a great job with the archeological museum theme in terms of both décor and puzzles. They not only give you the artifacts that you would expect, but they also give an insight into some inner workings of a museum!

I did find the whole stealing of the Golden Alpaca to be kind of secondary to the archeological theme though because, as Mr. P said, it didn’t feel very heist-y.

This room gets a #gold for its innovative and diverse puzzles. There is a lot to do here–make sure to bring your friends so you can divide and conquer!

I give this room a #gold because of the fun puzzles and the different locks! I’m looking to seeing what other rooms Arcadia puts together in the future!