Review: Escape Games Toronto

NO SPOILERS FOR ANY MISSION IN THIS REVIEW! I ONLY MENTION STUFF YOU GET TOLD BEFORE YOU EVER GO INTO THE ROOMS!

Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with Escape Games Toronto or any of their staff. My friends and I went to play Escape from Bleak Prison there this Sunday, and that’s the only time we had anything to do with them. I’ve never been to any other escape room company. I am, however, a former treasure-hunt designer (well, OK, I still do it but not as a business) interested in puzzles and games. But these review categories are completely arbitrary.

Thing being reviewed: Escape Games Toronto’s mission “Escape from Bleak Prison”

What is it: You and your friends get “locked” in a room decorated to look like a prison. You have to work together to solve puzzles in order to escape within the 1-hour time limit.

The review, in a nutshell: Fantastic. I like trying new things with friends, and of all the crazy stuff we’ve done so far, this is the only activity everyone loved immediately. We made plans to do it again as soon as we finished our mission. Go if you enjoy games and puzzles!

The review, not in a nutshell:

1. Atmosphere

In the lobby: From the moment you step into the business, there are fun things to do. Escape Games Toronto has a bunch of free board games to play while you’re waiting, comfy sofas and good gaming tables, and a selection of cheap snacks for sale. The staff is nice and happy to chat about cool things like puzzles and design.

In-game: The prison mission room has a great atmosphere: the furniture is appropriate to a prison, many of the clues are incorporated into things you’d expect to find in a (game) prison, and they use space and barriers well to make you feel limited in your movement without actually making you feel claustrophobic. The lighting is evocative.

It’s difficult to include set dressing in an exploratory puzzle game, because you run the risk of players picking up on red herrings and feeling cheated when they waste time on them. Players trust designers not to steer them wrong, and when you include something that appears to be a clue but isn’t, they can get rightfully annoyed. However, I think it’s worth a shot to enhance the scenario of the game  with details. For instance, one way to make the mission room feel even cooler would be sound design. What if we heard prisoners shouting in other rooms, the tick of a clock, guard’s footsteps, the sound of rats scrabbling in the walls? Tiny details, easily implemented, that help immerse the players.

I also would have liked to see a stronger story — maybe some more details about how we got into prison, what we were there for, how we got wrongfully accused, etc. Not a novel, but enough to help us play characters we wanted to root for. I’ve noticed people respond better to being on, say, Teams Good vs. Evil instead of Teams 1 vs. 2, and a lot of players have as much fun inhabiting a role in the world of the game as they do actually playing the game. Those who don’t ignore the story anyway, so everybody’s happy.

On a similar note, having staff behave in-character would also go a long way to enhancing player immersion. It could be something simple, like once the rules are explained, having someone in a guard uniform pretend to march us to our cells and tell us to put our hands behind our heads. Or it could be more in-depth in ways that affect the game-play, like having a prison guard character who steps in every  fifteen minutes and forces players to scramble back to their pre-escape positions to avoid a penalty (like 5 minutes added to your score). The sky’s the limit!

Anyway, the fact that the mission room inspired me to think of things like this tells you it did a good job.

2. Safety

Accessibility: One of our group carries a walking stick, sometimes for style and sometimes for help with joint pain. The staff immediately asked him if he’d be OK doing certain in-game activities, and they were happy to let him bring it in with slight rule modifications (i.e. “please don’t use it to bypass puzzles”) with which we were happy to comply.

In-game: The staff made a point of explaining that mission rooms adhere to fire code. They wisely leave the entrance-to-the-mission doors unlocked as emergency (or sick-of-this-game or need-to-go-pee) exits. They carefully explain the rules that help players avoid injury. We also had a walkie-talkie that connected us with the front desk in case we wanted to request a hint but also in case someone needed actual help. We ended up using it because our one-hour countdown timer suddenly turned off, and one of the staff came in immediately to figure out what was wrong.

3. Puzzles

Difficulty: We tried their easiest room first, and the puzzle difficulty was on the “easy” side of our right-for-us range. Hard enough that most answers weren’t obvious on first sight, easy enough that we didn’t struggle for more than a few minutes on any solution. We’re psyched to try harder missions.

Variety: Excellent puzzle variety. Puzzles rewarded hand-eye coordination, memory, technological literacy, word game prowess, patience, eye for detail, pattern recognition, creativity, and persistence. Everyone was able to contribute something different.

Sense of progress: Also excellent. Solving a puzzle opened up new (literal and/or metaphorical) avenues to explore and always felt like a step closer to the finish line.

Limits: What makes a puzzle effective is the limits you place on the player. Ideally, the player should be able to attack the puzzle creatively without breaking the puzzle or going off in a wrong direction. We didn’t spend much time on tangents, so the game was well designed in that respect.

However, I did feel like the limitations could have been more organic. When I was listening to the staff, the rules felt long and complicated, and many of them were difficult to understand without actually seeing the mission room and the stuff inside. I wished the rules were simplified, either by generalization or modification of the game. For instance, “don’t climb the walls” and “don’t throw things over the walls” wouldn’t be necessary if there were chicken wire between the walls and the ceiling; listing a bunch of things players shouldn’t touch could be simplified by using colour-coding to indicate things that aren’t part of the game.

Obviously, including a barrier between the walls and the ceiling might not be possible (or legal), and distinctive colour-coding might make the atmosphere less immersive. Striking the right balance is tough. My team had a good experience, because we aren’t the sort of people who’d climb out obviously not-intended-to-be-climbed walls anyway, but what works to keep us safe might not be enough to keep everyone safe.

Teamwork: My favourite thing about Escape Games Toronto is the way their puzzles encouraged teamwork. Not only did they tax a variety of different skills, they broke up puzzles in ways that encouraged players to cooperate to get things done efficiently. For instance, if a puzzle is physically so far away from a clue  that running back and forth between the places is a pain, you’re going to want one player to stand near the puzzle and another to stand near the clue instead of dashing around the mission room all the time. The mission is also designed so that players can work on different puzzles at the same time while still all tangibly helping the team progress toward the end goal.

4. Practical stuff

Price: We had a Groupon, but even without it, prices are really reasonable. Because they just opened, it’s $15-17 + tax per player. You get a special deal for back-to-back missions.

Location: Lots of parking, and only 5 minutes away from a TTC station. A bit confusing to find at first, but there is a sign, and the entrance is just around the back of the building.

Reservations: We reserved our mission (you need to know which room you’re booking when you sign up), but they do take walk-ins if they have space available. It was also not a problem when we showed up severally and with one fewer players than our reservation said — they were cool as long as we had enough people to play by the time of our booking.

Replayability:  Right now, they have four missions available. They told us they replace old rooms with new rooms every few weeks and gave a few examples of what’s coming up. You can also re-try rooms you failed the first time. So we’ll definitely be back again and again!

Verdict: Same as the nutshell review. We’ll be back! And if you like this kind of thing, give Escape Rooms Toronto your business — they deserve it!