May 26, 2018 – No time for rest as I headed onward from Kansas City. In a last minute judgment call, I decided to push forward to tick Oklahoma off my list of states. My original plan was to dedicate a trip to flying into Dallas and driving from there to Oklahoma City (cheaper than flying directly to Oklahoma City). But I had the time and relished the opportunity to get ahead of my planned pace for 2018.
After a VERY quick sprint to a nearby mall to scratch an itch for Dairy Queen, I rushed over to Safehouse to start my game. The venue was very busy and we had to wait an extra 20 minutes to start our game, but I didn’t mind the breather. It felt like no time at all before we started The Crypt.
I have to admit, I’m very hesitant to write about my negative experience. I know escape room owners work really hard to provide a neat, memorable experience, and the concept for the Crypt was definitely unique. But I also think there are some valuable lessons to be learned here about what parts of an experience make it satisfying or a disaster.
The Crypt is set up like a funeral parlor, with dummies seated in rows as if paying their respects. I’m not totally sure what’s supposed to be happening (are they all dead???), but it’s definitely a unique arrangement, and I’m always excited by new scenarios.
As the room started, we dove into the puzzles and were making incredibly good progress, and by only about 15 minutes in, we had just a handful of locks remaining in the room. We stalled, and after about 10 minutes of trying everything we could think of, we asked for a hint.
A minute went by, and no response. We asked again, and finally we got a nudge. Unfortunately, the nudge didn’t make sense to us, so after another few minutes, we asked for another. Then another. Each time, the hint actually seemed to make our objective less clear.
Now about 35 minutes in, we’re getting very frustrated. Then our game master nonchalantly drops a bomb in with her guidance to us, that something we had done made the room impossible to solve. Then she went silent again.
At this point, I’m wondering if I’m supposed to just walk out and quit. I had moved something that seemed pretty reasonable to move, and now apparently I was stuck waiting for the clock to run out, with nothing I could do aside from randomly picking numbers to try in the locks.
Finally after another few minutes, I got someone on the walkie talkie to agree to send someone in to fix things so I could proceed forward. Then I waited again. Five minutes go by. Ten. The clock dwindles into the single digits, and I’m still right where I was when the clock read 45:00. I seriously start to consider walking out, but by this point I’m already pretty far into the 50 states with a win in each state, and I’m holding on to the hope I can add an Oklahoma win to the pile. Finally with about five minutes left on the clock, someone comes in to help out.
At this point I tell them not to bother and that I’m ready to leave. The game master looks completely confused as to why I’m not having a good time, and assures me that our experience was exactly as designed because the room is their most difficult. Which of course is even more frustrating.
I then learn that all the hints we were getting were for the final puzzle in the room, which we couldn’t start until we had moved past some other obstacles. The clues didn’t make sense because we didn’t have all the pieces for it.
This is where I feel bad about sharing my negative experience. The game master took the stance of “I don’t know why you didn’t have a great time, but if you want to try another room, we’ll let you do it for free.” That’s something I’m very thankful for, and I’m sure the people at Safehouse are trying their best. I think their big problem is that they have seven open rooms, soon to be eight, and they have a small handful of people running all the games simultaneously. Had someone been actually monitoring and responding to us, our experience would have been fine start to finish.
We moved into the Homicide room and had a great time in the new environment. The room would have been a very good introduction to someone new to escape rooms, and it felt like an older Nintendo adventure game, like Deja Vu or Shadowgate. It even had a little twist to it regarding solving the mystery, which was a nice addition to the game without forcing us to read through mountains of material in the middle of our mission.
We cleared the room with a safe margin left on the clock, solved the mystery, and prepared to head straight back to Kansas City en route to Omaha, Nebraska.
At the end of the day, the people at Safehouse were able to salvage my visit. I hate being a needy customer. It doesn’t take that much to keep me happy as long as you keep throwing puzzles at me, and my scale of rating my experience tends to run from LIKE to LOVE to REALLY LOVE to BEST THING EVER. At the end of the day I hope my feedback on my negative experiences help businesses figure out what they can do to make the most of every customer experience.
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