Hidden Key Escapes, Escape Room Review

Hidden Key Escapes

Naperville, Illinois

The Hideaway: Kidnapped and taken for ransom, we had to escape a secret room. 

Pros: At the end of a long streak of escape room fails in Illinois, we were ready to hang up our hats and relinquish our title as escapologists. Until, we played The Hideaway at Hidden Key Escapes. We walked in determined to prove we were not complete failures. We were also starving and set on escaping before the restaurants closed. We set to work, methodically moving through the numerous puzzles. Clear game flow and logical puzzles helped keep us on track. We needed only one hint at the end (requiring us to move a piece of furniture despite our general hesitancy to do so given so many exhortations against doing so in other rooms). Finally, we escaped with much time to spare. We were elated and starving. So we hurried on out of there with a renewed love of escape rooms.

Cons: None. We escaped. We were literally so thrilled after our succession of losses that this place felt like the best escape room experience in the world. Seriously it did. But in retrospect, a clearly articulated storyline would have been nice. More creative set-design perhaps? Aw heck, who needs those, this is the best Illinois has to offer, so let's just congratulate them for logical puzzles and good game flow. Here, Here!*

*The sarcasm in this review is a result of Poorly-Designed Puzzle Fatigue (PDPF), a condition brought on by fruitlessly attempting to solve so many poorly design puzzles at other escape rooms in the area. Not at Hidden Key, thank goodness. 

http://www.hiddenkeyescapes.com

The Room Lisle, Naperville, Illinois

The Room Lisle

Naperville, Illinois

Einstein Room: Not sure what the story was for this room but there were images of Albert Einstein on the wall so we are guessing that's where the name came from. 

The Gallery: Famous paintings adorned the walls and we were tasked with discovering the forgeries and solving puzzles to escape. 

The White Room: A completely white room. 30 minutes. That's all you need to know.

Pros: There were three escape rooms at this place and clearly we love escape rooms.

Cons: Where to begin... Let's start with the game master. When we arrived, she proceeded to provide a 15 minute lecture on the DO NOTS of the room. These included the typical rules such as do not climb or break as well as a few we had never heard of before such as "put the clues back right next to where you found them so the staff doesn't have to work so hard in resetting the room" and "don't do any renegade moves." She went on to explain that renegade moves included jumping ahead. Now, it is our belief that in a well-designed game it would be truly impossible to jump ahead (lock-picking aside) so this has never been a problem for us. However, during and after our game we were indeed chastised for making renegade moves, much to our surprise. Apparently, we solved several puzzles "before we were supposed to" which to us was not a problem at all but to the game master was apparently a most vile violation. Our advice: if you don't want people to jump ahead, make sure there is no way for them to do so. It is all about puzzle design and good game flow. Besides that issue, we found the puzzles mostly tedious to complete, feeling more like homework than imaginative and fun puzzle solving. The same was true for both the Einstein Room and the Gallery. In the Gallery, we played with several children and were pleased to assign some of the more homework type puzzles to them rather than have to trudge through them ourselves. The sheer number of puzzles combined with the arduous nature of them made it difficult to escape in the time limit.  With no story lines, we didn't necessarily feel invested anyway and were not really sure why we needed to even escape. 

With regard to the White Room, let's just say that we solved it after we failed to solve it. That will make much more sense to you after you have played it. Interesting concept and we appreciate the philosophy behind it and especially the fact that it was completely contrary to our room escape instincts and challenged us to rethink our game-play strategy in general. With that said, we were divided on whether we disliked it very much or hated it altogether. 

http://theroomlisle.com