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.

the worst of houdini's escape rooms that we've done so far - the most glaring issue being that in the other rooms the host speaks to you via something in the story (an ai on the ship in space break, a parrot in the pirate ship for the pirate one etc.) which keeps you immersed even when engaging with the host. for this room there is no such system in place and you have to shout for the host who then physically runs into the room, completely taking away from the immersion aspect of the room.

the puzzles also felt fairly uninspired, a few really good ideas sprinkled in (which is why the rating isn't lower) but the room was predominately number/code locks which begins to be a drag after a while. the pacing of the room also feels off where you're given stuff pretty much immediately that isn't used until close to the end, 2 rooms later. while i can appreciate that there is going to be some misdirection in these rooms it's just frustrating when you've got maybe 4 numbered locks to open of varying lengths on the go at the same time and one of like 2 clues you immediately have is completely irrelevant for the next 30+ minutes.

one other issue we had was there's a moment where you've got to open something and it takes a decent amount of force as it seemed to be held shut by a magnet but the host specifies "no excessive force needed" so we assumed it was just closed and needed to be triggered to be opened for probably half of our time in the room while it was supposed to be accessible the entire time. it's a small cabinet type door and it took considerably more force than full sized doors took to open so take from that what you will.

theme was okay, but again not really up to the standard of the other rooms. this also extended to the props which just felt lacklustre once again in comparison to the others.

overall it was a disappointing room as i could see some pieces of great ideas just completely let down by the other aspects of the room, which ultimately just led to a monotonous experience. the ending was also underwhelming and didn't really feel like an ending, caught us off guard that it was over. story and plot line similarly just felt disjointed. i'd recommend against doing this room unless they address these issues, and just go ahead with one of their better rooms as the difference in quality is like night and day.

We made an evening out of playing two games at Houdini's Swindon. Despite only having been open a few weeks a number of puzzles were broken or missing. Both rooms were disappointing

You could tell they were understaffed, we would complete a puzzle and nothing would trigger - we would ask for a hint and the GM would ask “have you done this?” And we had, so he would say “2 minutes” and THEN it would trigger. Really disrupted the game play