Review: The Escape Room - The Zombie Room: Part I of the Zombie Apocalypse Trilogy

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

The beginning of an epic, multi-year trilogy where the premise is staying alive – and we’re not referring to disco.

Story

You can scream if you want to. No one will hear you. You are locked in a room for one hour and have to figure out clues, complete tasks and find the key to escape… before you die. Yeah…. it gets intense in there.

The Zombie Room was the first installment in the intense Zombie Apocalypse Trilogy. We found ourselves in the lair of The Plague Doctor, the mastermind conducting human trials in order to test a biological defense against a zombie outbreak.

We didn’t have to worry about whether we’d be immersed in this story. At The Escape Room, it is standard practice that players get so doused in the story that the sound of being covered in dead zombie guts actually becomes a readily welcome thought. This is the venue, after all, that boasts such intense and realistic experiences that its website openly touts that it will “seem uncomfortably too real.”

We are huge horror fans, and since many offerings in that genre aren’t actually that scary – to us, anyway – this room was a jump(scare) out of the box directly to a place we do not find ourselves very often: a little bit breathless and truly unnerved.

Scenic

One brilliant aspect of The Escape Room is that it is located within a massive old mall store, which makes the game space a complete and utter blank canvas. They are limited only by whatever they can dream up to go between those four walls. We’re talking endless possibilities and variations of walls, chambers – you name it.

For The Zombie Room, the setting was very fitting and one in which you could easily find yourself in one day, assuming that zombie outbreaks could actually happen, of course. The scenery spoke to the fact that the local population left in a hurry, but not before looting the resources available in the immediate area. What remained was a useless mess of shopping carts, segments of chain length fences, and trash strewn all over.

Before we entered the experience, The Plague Doctor, towering over us at about 6’10”, handcuffed and placed a hood over the head of one member of the group, leading her away alone. When he returned, he placed hoods over the remaining players’ heads, handcuffed them together and herded them like cattle into two locked, makeshift enclosures. These cages served the sole purpose of containing the human lab rats for the zombie cure test trials.

All areas containing players were separated but shared a common thread: complete darkness and no light source. Those lights would prove invaluable outside the pens as well, due to the big, scary part of the The Zombie Room that is inherently present in its name. That creepy-crawly feeling we got while confined in the dark turned out to be live zombies secured to a chain that got longer every five minutes. With that little gem, let’s go ahead and proceed directly to puzzles…

Puzzles

Talk about pressure to escape! No matter which enclosure players were in, they had a zombie just a few feet away. Oh yeah, and remember that every five minutes – which passes by very quickly in an escape room – the chain released a little bit, allowing the creature to get closer to us each time – carrying with it the most serious of consequences: DEATH. As in game over. And remember, at this time in the trilogy, an antidote has not been developed – so if you’re dead, you’re dead.

To avoid becoming zombie food, our first goal was to remove our hoods and find a light source. We quickly learned that there we no keys to be readily found for the handcuffs. The solution for escaping the pens, however, involved investigating extraneous articles of clothing The Plague Doctor had adorned us with before taking us hostage.

Once we were finally free to roam about the spacious and dimly lit room, this also put us into the same expanse as the main zombie. This portion of the game took some coordination, as searching and occasionally evading a zombie while being handcuffed to a complete stranger was quite a feat. As the zombie’s chain got longer and longer, the space we had at our disposal got smaller and smaller. We had to watch our every step and constantly have eyes in the back of our heads. It was treacherous with players tripping and scurrying about in the darkness.

We worked on random puzzles in waves, taking turns as the monster alternated its attention around the room. The tasks were simple and straightforward, which we were very grateful for. The panicky, there’s-a-monster-in-here-with-us environment did not bode well for having deep thoughts and solving advanced puzzles. There was no tech present, and the challenges and clues were well-hidden because of the darkness of the room.

In the end, we used shopping carts to herd the undead over behind a length of fence, where we kept him trapped at the peril of whoever was holding on within arm’s reach of the zombie. We took shifts holding the barricade in place until we solved all the puzzles presented, running out of time mere seconds before taking the key to unlock the exit door.

Overall

On paper, this story sounds exactly like the “Trapped in a Room with a Zombie” experience offered by a franchise throughout the country. Having played that game at one of those locations as well, there is a very distinct difference that we must note. The execution of this zombie room was vastly different and much improved over the franchised room. We were genuinely skittish and – dare I say it – scared, with The Zombie Room at the Escape Room, whereas we simply did not have that palpable fear present while playing the franchise room.

All of the games at The Escape Room thus far have been intense and included actors, so kids under 13 are not allowed to play. However, if this sounds a little too intense, you can simply call the venue ahead of time and they will customize your game to exclude the actor interaction.

Put simply, our experience at The Zombie Room was awesome. Stay tuned for the reviews of the other two installments in the Zombie Apocalypse Trilogy: Part II: The Infected Room and Part III: The Cure Room.