The Nerd Reactor Escape Room crew are back in the saddle again with our first escape room of the new year. Our newest challenge comes courtesy of Mission Escape Games located in Anaheim, CA. These guys are no stranger to escape rooms, as they have rooms located all over the East Coast including New York City. The Anaheim location is one of their newest, and houses the elusive Escape the Hydeout room.
The story goes that the good doctor has disappeared, but was able to leave behind clues to his whereabouts. It’s up to us to decipher these clues and try and solve this conundrum before Mr. Hyde appears. We were given the standard 60 minutes, like most escape rooms do, and our team of 5 set off to solve the mystery.
You start off in what appears to be Dr. Jekyll’s study. From there, our team split off scouring the room to take in everything and proceed to start solving puzzles. I felt like the puzzles were fairly challenging, and really made you think outside the box. To me, that is a good thing. I’ve played other rooms where solving the puzzles came way too easy, and required little effort. It takes the fun out of it.
Being a veteran team, we were crushing through a good portion of the puzzles. Having prior experience in other rooms really played a factor in not only how we were solving puzzles, but with the teamwork we had as well. I will admit that there were a few times we got stuck, but were then able to find our way with a slight “nudge” from our hosts. Most of the time, we try to make it through a room with using the least amount of hints as possible.
The reason for that is because some rooms will give you blatant hints that state the obvious on solving a particular puzzle, which takes a lot of the immersion away. Mission Escape is definitely not one of those. They’re able to deliver hints that have just enough info to spark your train of thought, yet keeping it vague enough not to easily give it away. It really kept you engrossed in the experience.
We were able to escape the room with 13 minutes left and only needed 3 nudges. From what our host told us in comparison to other teams that have come through, it was a very low number. They said most teams required at least 3-5. That’s actually saying a lot, as the room has a difficulty rating of 4 out of 5. It was a proud moment for us to not only be one of the top teams to finish, but also being in the 30% completion bracket.
This was our first time at Mission Escape Games and I must say that it was one of my favorite rooms out of the numerous ones I’ve done so far. From the puzzles to the many surprises that catch you off-guard, it was fun and exciting throughout the entire experience. I do have to give an extra nod to the production value as well, because they definitely put a lot of great ingenuity and tech into the room.
Currently, this is the only room they have, but there are 2 more on the way in the coming months. I can honestly say that I can’t wait to try the others as they release. If you’re in the Southern California area and looking for an escape room to try, I highly recommend this one.
For bookings and other info, you can check out the Mission Escape Games Anaheim site.
from Nerd Reactor
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