Escape Room Reviews: Escape Room in a Box

Company: Escape Room in a Box
Room: The Werewolf Experiment
Date Played: 8/19/17
Player Count: 2
Success:  Success!

Premise: You’ve purchased an escape room kit on kickstarter–wait, I mean, there’s some reason you might turn into a werewolf unless you solve a series of puzzles!

Immersion: This game does not effectively make you think you are in a mad scientist’s laboratory. To be fair, we didn’t follow the included party planning hints, which may have done the trick.  HOWEVER, this game does an okay job of making you feel like you’re playing a room escape game, which is a pretty good victory!

Highlights: While this game does have some basic paper-and-pencil kind of puzzles, it doesn’t feel like a workbook. There’s some genuine solving to do, some actual surprises, and some clever reveals, all while being self-contained in a surprisingly small box!  Comes with an object I wish I could take with me into every escape room. 

Lowlights: One element of the game broke in shipping. We didn’t actually realize exactly how it was broken until the game was over and we read the instructions on how to repack the game for a future player. 

And Finally:   Although I didn’t write up a little review for it, the only other tabletop escape room that I’ve played was the Escape the Room: Stargazer’s Manor box. (Summary: it’s fine. Worth buying on sale. More like an activity book than this game). This game differs from that one by including an impressive array of actual, physical objects to interact with, including real locks to be opened. This game is more expensive, but still much cheaper than most actual escape rooms, and does a great job of scratching that puzzle solving itch. 

Bonus highlight - when I wrote to the creators to inform them about the broken part of our game (mostly as a field report, not a complaint), they sent us a replacement part for use in repacking the game, hand delivered by one of their friends who lives somewhere nearby! That’s service!

I'm not going to place this on my list of ranked escape rooms, because that seems weird and unfair.  But if I did, it would probably beat at least half a dozen 'real' rooms. 

How to book this room yourself: UPDATE: The mass-market edition of the game is now available. You can buy it from Amazon here: http://amzn.to/2DaXwbb