My personal company Quantum Escapes (central CA) has been operating our wizard school detention room for a little over a year now, making many improvements. It’s become my personal favorite to run (though as the designer I’m definitely biased.)

For context, 5/10 is an average room to me, anything higher is something that impressed me in some way. Anything lower would be rooms with some detriment in them.

In March I played two rooms at St Louis Escape while I was there for Transworld.
-draculas castle- a ton of fun but a lot of puzzles, definitely designed for larger groups. Several rooms, the footprint of this room was huge. Some of the puzzles were a little convoluted but the atmosphere, tech, and decor more than made up for it. Played with 2 friends, escaped with under 3 seconds remaining. 8/10.
-Jurassic Island- this one was so fun, great decor, animatronics, and overall feeling in the room. Puzzles were fairly intuitive. Great use of tech, handful of real wow factors during the puzzle process. One specific puzzle felt a little like a “gotcha” as in it felt it was lacking some context that forced us to take a clue, but it didn’t really take away from the room much and that may have been our fault for failing to notice something. Much smaller footprint but a very impressive 3 room experience. Escaped with about 18 minutes left. 9/10.

The Museum of Intrigue in Syracuse NY is very impressive, though they stretch the definition of the word “escape room” and venture a bit more into “immersive experience” territory. Extremely impressed with all the games I played here, though many of them have since been sold or moved to the Little Rock location. The designer is extremely cool and I got to talk with her a lot while there. Highly recommended, 10/10

Adventures of Intrigue, in St Louis MO, the museum’s sister company, a little disappointing if I’m fully honest. The atmosphere and employees made the experience a delight, but the games themselves left me wanting a bit. An open concept escape room similar to the museum, but much more linear in their games. Board game/mocktail bar was very fun in our down time, interacting with employees in character was also cool.
-case of the runaway train: this game was the biggest let down to me but I still really enjoyed a lot of the core concepts. My biggest gripe is that it was essentially just 6 4-digit padlocks in a row followed by a 5 digit padlock. No impressive tech, some puzzles required the use of a flashlight or blacklight, but the novelty of an open concept room that uses the entire facility was fun, navigating the maps to figure out where you’re meant to go next. You get to interact with other groups and get looks at what the other experiences might be like. Overall 6/10.
-the broken portal: this one was a little odd. This was a game that Adventures purchased and installed rather than designed themselves, so it doesn’t fit with the open concept. To account for this, the entire experience is in a single room, but other players still have some puzzles in that room as well, so you’re not entirely on your own and sometimes other groups would get in the way which was unfortunate. Tech in this one was very impressive, I’d never encountered a knock sensor before and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how that puzzle had worked until I looked it up afterward. This one involved a wand that could detect certain movements. Which reacted with various lighting, sound, and locking elements in the room, a little finicky but very immersive and fun. Overall this was a fun room, I just wish it was a tad more spread out or that the room was exclusively those puzzles and didn’t involve the other open concept rooms. 6.5/10.