THE HAUNTED APARTMENT

Outside the standard procedural customer service (debriefing, payment, pictures), the staff was approachable. We were given walkie-talkies to call for hints and they came expediently. There was also free water, which is always appreciated.

The people are friendly and prompt. I also love how they give you a polaroid, and then you get a choice as to whether you want to keep it or if you want them to hang it up on their wall of successes!

There were some never-before-seen puzzles here. Every once in awhile, we would encounter a puzzle that made us go “Whoa, how did they do that?” I’m going to be honest and say that after our experience with Cell No. 8, my expectations for this room weren’t all that great. I’m glad that I was proven wrong.

My rating would’ve been higher had it not been for the very finicky execution of some of the puzzles. Our game master had to come in to reset a puzzle repeatedly. There were also some red herrings that weren’t necessary. In a nutshell, the concepts were good, but the execution needed some polishing.

The puzzles in this room were for the most part quite well done! The mechanics behind some puzzles were really impressive and we were all wondering how they pulled off some of the really creative things in this room.

That said, our puzzles didn’t always work even though we did things correctly. I think that a puzzle should work 100% (or something very near it) of the time when you do it right. When your game master has to come in to set things up in JUST the right way even though you’re already doing it right, it’s a little bit disappointing since you don’t get the full satisfaction from managing to do a puzzle.

The room looked very shabby, and I guess they could get away with it because it was supposed to be a scary apartment after all. The shabbiness of it all might not have been purposeful though. Some of the wirings were exposed, some of the props were unglued from the wall, and some of the diary snippets needed proofreading. (Grammar wasn’t the issue, but, rather, one clue was printed out and had a typo that was underlined with a red zigzag–like, really?)

Mr. P talked about the props already, but I also wanted to mention their use of space. I thought it was a bit of a strange decision to have most of their puzzles in the smaller rooms, with the largest room having very little in the way of puzzles. I think that the larger space could have been used a bit more effectively (although it did look very creepy!).

I thought the music for this room did its job in providing a creepy atmosphere. Unfortunately though, once we moved to the other portions of the room, we couldn’t hear it anymore.

There was also a moment here when all of us screamed. We were scared, so they did a good job. However, The Haunting of Apartment 103 did a similar trick so we already expected it to happen. Luckily we went with a group of friends who hadn’t seen the trick, so it was fun seeing their reaction.

The music here was really creepy, but I wish it was just a little bit louder and that we could hear it throughout the entire room.

The overall theme was easy enough to accomplish–a haunted apartment. The reason why it was haunted in the first place is where I have trouble understanding. The backstory, diary snippets, and clues all tried to explain the reason, but each one of those components was disconnected from one another. There wasn’t a connecting thread that outlined the story.

Haunted apartments are a quintessential escape room theme. I thought this room had a bit of a tough time trying to piece together a backstory. Even as we progressed through the room, I wasn’t entirely sure how everything was thematically related.

I would give this room a #gold rating. Although far from being perfect, there were some cool things in terms of puzzles, and some of the scares were legit. I recommend this room if you and your friends are looking for a moderate scare.

This room gets a #gold. The puzzles here were unique, but I wish they worked on our first go! If you’re looking for something scary, but not something that’ll give you a heart attack, this would be a good room to do.