RATING: 2 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 10:27
Jurassic Park? Never heard of it. This is Jurassic Escape: completely different.
Dinosaurs are loose and hunting again in Oak Brook thanks to an evil corporation’s cloning experiments. It’s up to you and your team to stop their cloning process as you sneak through their facility. Do that and avoid the dinosaurs and you can save Chicago and get out of Jurassic Escape.
First, lets address the dinosaur in the room. This is clearly at best heavily inspired by a beloved movie franchise IP. It’s impossible to ignore how the plot of one of the movies is the exact same plot of this escape game. With that said, who doesn’t love dinosaurs?
Dino rights enthusiasts break into this evil corporation’s science lab where dinosaurs are being cloned and weaponized. After finding and breaking into the lab, the only thing left to do is to find a way to shut it down permanently.
Well, that’s the idea at least. Escape The Room is notorious for having a story but not implementing the narrative into the game itself and Jurassic Escape is no exception. Honestly, without knowing the story going into the game one might think the goal was to steal some dino DNA to use for personal use.
Escape The Room is strongest when it comes to scenic, and Jurassic Escape is among its best looking games. After breaking into the building, the first task is getting out of a steel cage like structure intended to transport these massive prehistoric beasts. Escape The Room really sets the mood immediately; there’s an actual dinosaur in an adjacent cage crying out for help (or maybe looking for a meal)
In the control room, there’s a pretty interesting feature that allows access to some of the compound’s security cameras, giving views of a few different places throughout the building (in storyworld, not anywhere you actually get to visit).
Finally, activists find themselves in the lab itself. This room feels very sterile and it’s immediately evident there have been a number of experiments going on. The more interesting part of this section is an incubator housing a dinosaur egg in the middle of the room.
Here’s where everything falls apart. There is almost no logical flow throughout this game. Several times, solving a puzzle triggers something but it’s often difficult to even determine just what that is. In fact, throughout the visit, there were times where it wasn’t evident a puzzle had even been solved, let alone any idea of how it was actually completed.
What would be a few memorable moments are hindered by puzzle flow that makes no logical sense. At one-point, would-be scientists scan an object to verify it’s of ancient reptilian origin. Grabbing one of the eggs sitting in the center of the room would be perfectly logical. Instead, a completely different item found much earlier in the game is required, but there is no intuitive connection as to why that would be the case.
To make things even more annoying, after getting a clue, it leads to a solution that is a huge logic leap, making it’s difficult not to question if it is even correct or for that puzzle in the first place. Frustration creeped in pretty quickly and it got to the point that our team just wanted to be done with the game and head home.
Escape The Room has greatly evolved their scenic process in recent years, but it continues to fall short when it comes to puzzles. What starts off as an exciting experience thanks to its setting, quickly turns into confusion and frustration. It feels as if they have a great idea on how a game should look but then just mash puzzles into it for puzzles sake.
Just as Jurassic Park’s inception and operation were plagued with planning problems that led to catastrophe, this is perhaps the one area where Escape The Room comes closest to its inspired subject matter. This Jurassic Escape is one adventure that is better off extinct.
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Venue: Escape The Room
Location: Oak Brook, Illinois
Number of Games: 8
GAME SPECIFIC INFORMATION:
Duration: 60 minutes
Capacity: 8 people
Group Type: Public / You may be paired with strangers.
Cost: $34 per person