Houdini’s Escape Room Experience York: Escape From Alcatraz

After having really enjoyed Titanic I had high hopes for this room, but unfortunately, it was an enormous let down.

It started off badly when the GM told us we 'didn't look experienced enough' to play this room (she said it had a 23% success rate), and laughed at us when we said we were still willing to give it a go. I've never encountered a GM like this before and we were all left feeling quite uncomfortable. 

The game itself was difficult purely because the puzzles were illogical. Once found, they were easy enough, but to actually locate what the puzzles were required huge leaps in logic. It just became a guessing game. The room was also relatively plain, and the design got worse as the game progressed. One section was a plain white room with about 5 props in- I've never seen an escape room so sparse. 

We were clued through a hatch in the door, which was a fun idea, but our GM was talking to her colleagues while we waited for her to clue us. This totally broke any sense of immersion, and we almost considered leaving. 

We did eventually escape, though the final puzzle was broken so this was revealed by the GM coming in at the end to tell us that we'd completed the room.

I would absolutely not recommend, there are much better options elsewhere. 

Host just kept walking into the room and standing there. Felt a little bit patronising. Abit weird. First room was great head high expectations. Some red flags to waste time. I like to be able to guess a clue and still be able to open it. With this game they won't allow that. It's all manually triggered. The last clue wasn't even in the room. It was thrown in. The game was completely controlled by the games master

The room design was great and the starting puzzles made sense.

After the first part is over the puzzles become random so they didn’t follow on logically and it was just a case of open as much as you can quickly. 

Our games master was terrible, he was rude to us despite telling us “you must ask for help if you need it in this room”.

Because there is no intercom system it breaks the atmosphere every time you do ask for help and the host has to come in and check if props work or if you’ve done something right.

Again when asking for help our games master did not communicate well, he spent at least two minutes staring at us like we were idiots, and then at certain stages began opening the door, wondering in, and taking items from us when they didn’t work. He started unlocking items himself without explanation, and even began throwing props we would need into the room at us.

We were only two puzzles away from escaping in the end but I wasn’t convinced by the time keeping as the watch is set showed we still had five minutes. I think the games master was having a bad day and ended up taking it out on us. Really made us feel like fools and treated us poorly.

Amazing host, gave option of immersion level, would highly recommend full immersion, makes the clues a little more cryptic.

Room was well decorated, puzzles were logical and had plenty going on for the size of us and maybe larger groups.