Review: Escape Room 60 - Area 51 | Burlington, VT Escape Room

RATING: 4 Keys RESULT: Loss REMAINING: X:XX

An escapee alien hiding in an abandoned government facility? We want to retrieve!

Story

Your team responds to a distress signal from top-secret government facility Area 51. Aliens are real and one has escaped in the facility. You have 60 minutes to follow the clues from the missing scientists, capture the escaped alien lifeform, and trigger facility shutdown — before it’s too late.

While the basic outline of the narrative seems promising enough, the connective tissue to this alien tale is on a need-to-know basis and it’s been determined that we do not need to know.

More a mishmash of various sci-fi tropes than a compellingly told story, Area 51 touches on enough plot points to move into the world of extraterrestrial intrigue, but does not offer much in the way of exciting developments along the way.

Scenic

Area 51 takes place entirely within the titular facility, a cavernous room adorned with maps of the solar system, computers, and other various research equipment. Everything is in it’s place and, at first glance, the most notable element of the scenic design is just how unremarkable it all is. With the exception of one wall ominously made up of some metallic alien material, the contents of the room could be found within any non-secret research station.

With the promise of an underground lab ravaged by an escaped alien and the subsequent abandonment of its captors, Area 51 is surprisingly pristine. It feels like a missed opportunity that the mysterious facility shows no signs of its previous inhabitants, no sign of struggle, no signs of life. It appears that the occupants disappeared without a close encounter of any kind.

Thankfully, there is more to the facility than meets the eye, and as the hour ticks down, alien recovery specialists will reveal a few of the secrets hidden deep in the Nevada dessert. Ultimately transforming the seemingly mundane research station into something much more exciting, and a bit more sinister.

Puzzles

With such a large facility to explore, puzzles are scattered about, able to be tackled in a non-linear fashion and ideal for larger groups of explorers. Specialists will have to use a variety of science and outer space themed items to gain access to many compartments hidden around the room. Some obvious, and some very much not-so-obvious.

While the puzzles were related to aliens and science in a general sense, they rarely appeared to relate to the specific emergency for which the team was summoned. In fact, shortly after the timer started ticking, it was easy to lose the plot and with it, any notion of urgency.

This is not to say that the puzzles did not provide fun for our group of alien hunters. In fact, the various tasks required of our exploration crew were the highlight of the mission, keeping us entertained and engaged. We loved hatching extraterrestrial eggs, disarming a nuclear launch system, and a particularly clever use of Google Maps. The only exception to this was a few clunky puzzles that took up more time than they should, simply due to poor design or perhaps over-use.

Overall

With decades of speculation as to whether or not Area 51 even exists, the opportunity to explore it’s halls and reveal it’s secrets could entice even the biggest of skeptics. Unfortunately, on a narrative level, the adventure did not live up to its full potential. What could have been a compelling and tense exploration of things gone awry at a notorious government facility was ultimately rather sterile.

This lack of focus was most evident in the inability to hone in on an exact storyline, or even film franchise to base the puzzles off of. Clearly starting off in Area 51, the storyworld eventual morphs into nods to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Granted, they both deal with aliens, but Area 51 is not a central element of Close Encounters. This may not seem like the biggest of deals, but it is an inconsistency that is indicative of lack of attention to detail across the board.

Ultimately, Area 51 was content to use general alien mythology as a skin to cover a set of very fun puzzles, rather than dive deep into a specific mystery that would keep extraterrestrial recovery specialists satisfied and telling the tale for decades to come.