Which Escape Room is the Best?

Escape Room is the Best

A popular new type of attraction has popped up in cities around the world: escape rooms. The concept is simple: a group of players (typically 4 to 20) enters a room decorated like something strange or scary, such as an abandoned cabin in the woods, a bank or a coffin. They have a limited amount of time (usually one hour) to solve puzzles of various types that give clues to a final puzzle for unlocking the door. The best escape rooms make it possible to feel fully immersed in the theme, while also delivering a frenetic sense of escapism and a healthy dose of brainteasing against a ticking clock.

Some are more realistic than others, offering a truer feeling of being trapped in a heavily decorated space with a set of real-life riddles to solve against the ticking of an actual clock. The biggest escape room franchises tend to offer these more realistic experiences, but some independent operators are also upping their game by using augmented reality to add an extra layer of immersion.

The immersive experience can be more than just a fun way to hang out with friends or co-workers, as escape room are often marketed as a team building exercise. Some even host corporate events for groups of employees or clients.

Which Escape Room is the Best?

Despite the fact that most escape rooms are not meant to be scary, they can still deliver plenty of creepy moments. A bloody handprint on a wall or a disembodied voice could all be enough to send a shudder down your spine, and some of the best escape room games have a good stab at this.

The best escape rooms often rely on the sense of immersion to create their themes, and some of the more impressive ones have a good sense of realism that makes them all the more convincing. This is especially true of those designed to look like a movie set. BrainXcape in Manhattan, for instance, has recruited designers from the immersive theater production Sleep No More to craft some bone-chilling rooms that take place in its Flatiron space. Its The Haunted Hotel, Rikers 1932 and Game of Gold experiences all feature dark prison decor that will have you hearing those echoing guard footsteps in your head.

Some of the best escape room games are those that don’t rely on technology to recreate the feel of being trapped in a dark space, and Deckscape is the best example of this. This mobile escape room series doesn’t use virtual lockets that metaphorically open when you draw solution cards or crack codes by entering numbers into a companion app; it uses functioning padlocks instead to keep the illusion alive. This approach also helps it avoid the common pitfall of having players tap all over the screen in a hope that they might stumble across some hidden clue or snag that last little bit of progress.