Escape Room Gone Wrong

When the players enter an escape room with their eyes closed, they are mostly expecting amazing adventures, incredibly talented puzzles, and inspiring live actors to create the best possible experience for them. Or if they are not positive thinkers, they expect a decent journey with a beginning and the end. But sometimes an escape room can go wrong, and there is nothing you can do with that. Well, maybe asking for a refund will work.

Today we’ll talk about not a single escape room gone wrong, but about a series of experiences that we had ourselves when researching how to make escape rooms. And everyone to know that the best way to learn is to play as many escape quests as possible! Also, there’ll be cases of other players who just happened to be in the wrong time or the wrong place.

This escape room is a work of art created by a little kid. Who knows what a masterpiece would that be in real life!

Escape Room Gone Wrong: The Experience

You might not from the start that your escape room has gone wrong, but you will find it out eventually. Note that the problem is not always with lousy escape rooms; there are many options to spoil an escape quest, and we are going to share at least some of them.

  1. Broken puzzles. When you ask for a hint because you’re stuck, and you get the tip, and you still have no idea what to do, sometimes it’s not because you are missing something. If you hear the staff saying “Errm… Wait a minute!” in the microphone, and then there is a clear paper rustle on the background, then maybe that puzzle is just failed from the start.
  2. Distracted, inadequate or even drunk actors. This won’t happen in a quality escape room location, as there’s always someone who checks on the staff. But if the creators aren’t yet experienced in management, you might encounter a zombie who won’t be bothered by trying to catch you because he is too busy playing Candy Crush on the phone! On the other hand, who knows! Maybe that’s just an alternative look on the zombie apocalypses!
  3. Wrong escape room. Not a particularly common event, but a possible one if the staff doesn’t have much experience or just happened to have a bad day. Some people report signing in for a pirate escape only to find themselves in a realistic war bunker. The other exciting case included accidentally putting the players who wanted to perform a bank heist in a jail. Punishment before the crime: is that even legal?

Did you ever have weird or outright stupid situations in escape rooms that have gone wrong? Please tell us all about it in the comments!