So this is kind of an odd back-story. After 17 or so games, my friends had finally lost their first escape room. I had no intentions of going out that evening, so they found some time to try to tackle a room on their own. It’s worth noting that the two of them alone, have been able to escape from rooms I had previously been to in better times.
So when they messaged me and let me know that they had lost a room, my mouth dropped. But, then they went into more details:
1) They somehow managed to not get paired with strangers at America’s Escape Game
2) They played a room at America’s Escape Game with two people only
These are big rooms with a LOT to do in them usually. So I guess I wasn’t terribly surprised when the venue was named. I’m not sure they knew how much they actually had left to do in the room. I asked the unthinkable though: “Would you ever play it again, to see the story through?”. Again, to my surprise, they were willing to go back and play “Pandemic” again, this time with me.
Venue: America’s Escape Game - Orlando
Location: 8723 International Drive Suite 115 Orlando, FL 32819
Website: https://americasescapegame.com/orlando/
Cost Per Person: $35.00 per person (very public)
Game: Pandemic
Difficulty: 3 out of 5 (per players’ perception)
Room Capacity: up to 8 allowed; 4 to 5 players seemed optimal
Played By: John, Brian and Sarah
Game Duration: 60 Minutes
Type: Mostly Mechanical
Rooms at Venue: Currently 6 Rooms
Rooms Completed: 66
America’s Escape Game is located right in the heart of Orlando’s Tourism District on International Drive. We typically anticipate being paired or grouped with “randoms” whenever we visit this location, but in a stroke of luck, the three of us had the room to ourselves.
It’s not my intent to dwell on the storyline of “Pandemic”. If you don’t know what the word means, “Pandemic” is essentially a world-wide outbreak of a new disease. This is a classic escape room storyline that really doesn’t even try to be creative about it. No, you won’t be turning into a zombie or a werewolf, you’re just going to die, along with everyone else, if you don’t find the miraculous cure within a 60 minute time frame. Although being a werewolf may not be so bad (cue Thriller dance). It was said that the cure was created within a secret laboratory but being on lockdown, it’s not so easy to get to. You’ve managed to infiltrate the front lobby and are tasked with breaking in, solving clues and saving the entire world. You got this!
Here we are: the Lobby. America’s Escape Game isn’t known for bad games and bad experiences. They are known for having multiple locations and having a bit more of a budget for games. Our previous experiences there with “Crisis at 1600” and “The Lost Tomb of Monthu” (which also just received a make over and with mostly all new puzzles) saw a large amount of real estate at their disposal. With “Pandemic”, it’s not exactly a small experience, but it does appear that at least, this room layout sacrificed some space for the others.
Back to the Lobby: a room with some gear, some HAZMAT coats, respirators, ventilation and two pairs of automated, metallic sliding doors (think elevator entrance on either side of you).
The story-line progression isn’t bad at all, as you make your way into what almost appears to be an office and then later into the actual heart of the facility; the laboratory. Naturally, successful players will obtain the cure within the given hour and escape.
There’s not a lot in here that will captivate seasoned players in the décor category, but for this particular setting, it’s not really required. It is, at the end of the day, a research facility.
So far, everything is looking good.
“Pandemic” includes some pretty cool actions and unique puzzles. Some one-step and others, fairly complex. The first room itself involves quite a bit of discovery along with using some tools and searching what I consider to be some fairly unorthodox (at least in my experience) locations. I loved that. I don’t mind seeing “unorthodox” in games.
But I want to focus on two features within this room that left a bad taste in my mouth. The first being what we’ve come to expect now that we’ve done more than one game at America’s Escape Game: the crossword puzzle. Look, I’m not one to go ape shit over sudoku or word searches or at-home puzzles being featured in a room. To me, it is what it is and with the right presentation and pay-off, it won’t annoy me that much. However, the AEG style of crossword remains unaltered from experience to experience. Aside from the theming of the clues and solutions (yeah, these were related to medical terms…woo!), this was the same puzzle we saw in “Crisis…” and “…Monthu”. With our previous experience, we were able to take a few short cuts and guess the solutions before 100% completing everything. My hopes are that AEG can bring new rooms into their rotation that don’t feature this puzzle anymore OR at the very least, provide a different pay-off. We’ve seen it before and it was somewhat enjoyable. This time, it just felt like a time sink/choke point in the game.
And speaking of time sink, this next one falls into what may be the most annoying and painfully time consuming puzzle I’ve ever approached and IS the reason why I stated that 4 to 5 people may seem optimal in this room. Most of these puzzles can be completed with 2 to 3 people, max. Let me just call it the Vial Puzzle. I won’t go into what needed to be done here. We’ve seen a puzzle like this before in another medical-related room and even then, with 75% less of the work, it felt annoying. Even knowing what had to be done (which isn’t the difficult part), it took two of us between 10 to 15 minutes of uninterrupted work to complete this…and even when the 4th and final part of this task was being worked on, I didn’t wait to see the complete reveal before just fudging the code we needed. It was THAT tedious and THAT annoying. I don’t mind complex puzzles that involve several steps, but once the mechanics are figured out by players, it shouldn’t take 100+ subsequent, repeating actions to complete a puzzle.
The whole room wasn’t like this and after fudging the end of the aforementioned puzzle, we entered the third and final room of our adventure to once again, save the world. There was a moment where I was actually startled by a prop and whether it was intended or not, the whole group got a laugh out of it.
The third and final room was the crown jewel of this experience: there was one multi-step puzzle that involved the aforementioned prop and some medical viewing tools to help find the missing doctors. It took a few minutes but no there was no frustration because it was an somewhat familiar puzzle with a new twist.
The pinnacle and climax of the room came when players were limited in their range of motion by a physical barrier and had to accomplish several tasks. It’s not mandatory, but would be highly beneficial to have at least three people in the room (see above) and great communication and team work to accomplish this task. We felt that it was a solid ending to a room that had it’s fair share of peaks and valleys.
Through it all, we were able to find the cure to the Pandemic and escape the facility with about 15 minutes remaining (and I'm sure this is only because two of the three players had already tried this room once before).
The room itself mostly contained puzzles that at least tried to stay with the theme of a research facility. It contained a wide range of types of puzzles but as mentioned in a good portion of this review, it also had some puzzles that overstayed their welcome and did a better job of sucking the life out of us than the virus we were trying to save the world from.
For this, we think that “Pandemic” is a pretty good room. It’s definitely NOT a bad room by any means and players will have a good time. Players new to this venue will enjoy the challenges whereas returning visitors, like our group, may grow weary of the dreaded, repetitive puzzle that shows up in each room. We do definitely recommend giving “Pandemic” a go and we thank our wonderful GM for recognizing this was Brian and Sarah’s second attempt and subsequently having fun with that fact.
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