Final tally for the trip which started Friday before last – thirteen escape rooms and two Geocaches. I wish I had more time to explore some of the neat places I encountered but am ultimately happy with what I was able to see.
Following up on my last post about exploring Syracuse, I ended up being extremely impressed with Destiny Mall, the venue containing Museum of Intrigue. It was easily the coolest mall I’ve set foot in outside of Singapore. I saw three escape room style venues, go carts, RC cars, amusement centers, a three story ropes course, multiple unique ice cream shops, mini golf, and a movie theater, and I didn’t even explore the full facility. Really glad to see there are still some thriving malls in the US and wish we had something like this closer to home.
Museum of Intrigue was a really neat experience. The closest experience I have to it is Wizard Quest, exploring a large space and seeking out the puzzles, tools, and secrets related to a chosen quest. It was really neat how many secrets were tucked away in the exhibits I had been running back and forth through all day.
Before leaving the Rochester/Canandaigua area, I visited escape rooms in Rochester (Omega Escape) and Buffalo (Escape City Buffalo). We played two games back to back at Omega with Christina’s coworkers, setting the record on the first of the two games we played! At Escape City Buffalo, we played the TERPECA finalist game Over the Falls featuring a very impressive cargo ship set and lots of running water.
On our way back from Canandaigua, we stopped and played all three games at 5 Wits in Erie, PA. I found that experience incredibly interesting for a few reasons, but the most notable one for me is that 5 Wits is very vocal about not being an escape room but rather an interactive story experience. The reason I find that so interesting is because for a lot of people, the type of experience 5 Wits offers is their north star for what they want escape rooms to be, so the fact that 5 Wits doesn’t consider this an escape room really calls out how subjective the ideal experience is.
Now that we’re back home, it’s time to start planning the next adventure. I’ll write more in depth about some of the experiences I’ve had along the way, too – my backlog of remarkable and unusual experiences is growing faster than I can write about them!
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