August 26, 2018 (flashback) – I didn’t need to solve an Arizona escape room on my visit thanks to my earlier visit to Gray Matter Escape in Lake Havasu (on my Vegas trip). However, Adil and I had some time before my flight and figured why not add a little to our adventure?
We set our sights on Escape Room Tucson, not far from Adil’s residence. We got to the venue quite early but weren’t allowed in and browsed a nearby boot store to kill some time before our room. After deciding against getting a fresh set of footwear for the room, we returned to the escape room and started our challenge.
The Inside Job was a heist room of sorts, and the objective was to get a large diamond out of a vault. On the way, we’d find numerous other treasures to collect and total up at the end.
The room decor was decent, with a few neat mechanisms that helped the experience capture our imaginations. The vault door in particular was a nice touch as an interactive part of the game. The puzzles were well-designed and fair.
The room gave us only three hints to work with, and we needed to be very cautious using them. In the end I felt two of our hints were wasted. One of them we were forced to use because we wanted to save time on identifying the proper way to input a code we had into a locking mechanism, which otherwise would have required a little trial and error (and after using our hint, it appeared we may have actually tried the proper solution, but that the lock was a little sticky). Another hint revealed that Adil had accidentally put a clue into our treasure collection along with the treasure.
Time ran out with only two locks left to go between us and the diamond. We lost but still had a good time working our way through the puzzles in the room. Then the bomb drops- the attendant tells us she can’t tell us what the last puzzle or two were, and that we’ll have to purchase tickets and play the whole thing again if we ever want to find out.
Adil wasn’t too bothered by this, but it really made me upset. There’s no way I would pay a full admission just to solve the last puzzle or two in a room I already paid for. I’ve done rooms at two different businesses in Illinois where you don’t get the solution if you lose, but in both cases it’s forewarned heavily and there’s a reason for it. If Escape Room Tucson’s plan is to get a little extra money out of customers, I find that strange- Escape Room Tucson has four different rooms, and I don’t know if the number of customers paying to repeat a room would outweigh the number of customers discouraged from doing the other rooms because of this. Also, I realized that this business model is probably part of why the attendant was so stingy with nudges and made us burn our clues on things most businesses would intervene on much sooner.
I’m also curious how often customers have their experiences ruined if they’re joined by strangers who have already solved most of the room and skip right to the finish. Based on my experience here, I suspect the business’s response would be “caveat emptor,” or “let the buyer beware.”
One other element I found a little unusual was that the attendant was following us around and resetting everything right after we interacted with it. I think this was done to save time instead of having to reset the room after we were done with it, but if I’m paying full price for an incomplete experience, this kind of thing bothers me just a little more than it otherwise would have.
So in summary, the room was enjoyable, but my enjoyment of the situation was tainted somewhat by the venue’s business model. If you bring your A game and don’t waste any hints, it shouldn’t affect you at all, but I’d still be wary about voting with your dollar for practices like these.
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