Phoenix, Feb 2018
This room starts off great with some excellent themed decor before even entering the room. This continues throughout as well; a lot of thought has gone into creating a dirty New York subway station. This is consistent with the sneak preview of their two other rooms, where again it looked at a glance like a lot of effort had gone into the decor.
The thing that struck me most about this room was the contrast in puzzle quality; there was a huge contrast between some very good, innovative puzzles (often with physical elements linked into the theme), and some very flawed ones. The room had a number of puzzles.
First, we were given 1 torch between 8 people in a very dark carriage. Afterwards they said this was to encourage teamwork, but 3 or 4 torches would have had the same effect and this actively hindered us solving puzzles.
Second, there were parallel puzzles with multiple identical padlocks – this was unoriginal and wasted a lot of time trying the same code in multiple locks and could easily be avoided.
Finally, one of the puzzles required you to repeat similar calculations a large times, whilst another both had an ambiguous order and required outside knowledge without providing content.
I found those problems highly frustrating, although also relatively minor problems that could be easily fixed; which was a shame because they detracted from what was in other respects a superb game. 