There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph, so let’s get started.

Yes it’s April 1st

And yes, this is also 100% real. I want to state that without any ambiguity. While much of what we are doing is silly, it isn’t a joke.

We have a longstanding tradition of producing silly yet earnest content on April Fools Day.

We truly made a 44 page cookbook and party guide completely devoted to throwing a black light dinner party. It contains 17 different recipes ranging in complexity from anyone can do it to… a pathological level of commitment to the joke.

Why Do a Black Light Dinner Party?

Years back, Brett Kuehner and I learned how beautifully tonic water glows under blacklight. This led to us experimenting with shining black lights on all sorts of different foods and beverages. We found that a small but not insignificant amount of food either glows or reflects black light.

Unrelated to this, my parents had a cooking club for decades. Every 6 weeks, they and 5 other couples would assemble in one of their kitchens for a day and cook a meal set to a theme chosen by the hosts. I literally grew up around people getting together to communally take on cooking challenges.

Finally, black lights are an iconic symbol and trope of escape room design, for better and for worse.

These three ideas collided to inspire the Black Light Dinner Party. I loved the idea of gathering a bunch of local escape room friends who could really cook to have fun together and share a strange meal.

Also… my parents joined in, and that was special.

What’s Included in the Cookbook?

A lot. As I said… this got silly. If you aren’t familiar with our work, we have a tendency that lean towards overkill with just about everything that we do.

In addition to 17 recipes that all glow under black light and taste great, you’ll receive a hosting guide that includes all sorts of interesting tidbits about the oddities of hosting a party flooded with black lights.

Here’s a sample recipe:

How Am I Getting a Free Cookbook?

The Black Light Dinner Party cookbook is a project to fight hunger.

We will email you a PDF of the Blacklight Dinner Party Cookbook if you make a donation of $40 or more to World Central Kitchen and fill out the form below including a screenshot with confirmation of your donation.

Why $40? Think of this as like buying an escape room ticket’s worth of food. Our friends at Morty sliced the data from various angles and found that on average, for a standard group of 4, players pay about $40 per person. This data is based on a pricing sample from 25% of the venues in the US in 2026.

That’s it. We will use your email to send you the cookbook, and nothing else. This isn’t marketing bullshit and we will not giveaway or sell your contact information.

We’re asking you to make your donations directly (1) so that you know exactly where your money is going, (2) because we aren’t setup to properly pass this money through to a charity without having to pay taxes on it, and (3) because we aren’t trying to steal your tax deductions. We’re just trying to use a fun idea to raise money for a good cause.

If you can afford to donate more, we absolutely encourage it. That’s what we did.

Why World Central Kitchen?

The world has no shortage of problems, and one of the first things that’s needed when a crisis sets in is food. Given that we were having fun with food, we felt like the most appropriate way to honor our abundance was to support people for whom food is scarce.

“Founded in 2010 by Chef José Andrés, World Central Kitchen (WCK) is first to the frontlines providing fresh meals in response to crises. Applying our model of quick action, leveraging local resources, and adapting in real time, WCK has served hundreds of millions of meals around the world.”

My parents like supporting World Central Kitchen, and that fact mixed with the organization being well run and highly rated (Charity Navigator) sealed the deal.

To get things rolling, we have donated $500 to World Central Kitchen:

Also… we did try to find a black light charity, but failed to find one. So we settled on food.

Purchase

Share an image of your receipt, including the date, donation amount (at least $40), and name of the charity (World Central Kitchen).

Note that responses are not automated. A human will read your email and send you back the cookbook within 24 hours. Please excuse any time delays.

This response time (24 hours) is only available from April 1st – April 9th, 2026.

Black Light Dinner Party Cookbooks will still be available at this link later, but usually with a slower response time.

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who cooked for our blacklight dinner party: Lauren Greene, Brett Kuehner, Denise Kuehner, Andrew Reynolds, Joan Spira, Marc Spira, and Madeleine Welch.

Thank you to Steve Ewing for his photography and videography documentation of the fesivities.

Thank you to Theresa Wagner for her graphic goblin amazingness.

And especially, thank you to Brett Kuehner, who not only cooked for the party, but also helped us turn this insane idea into something real, and put so much extra effort into making the cookbook exist.

The post We Hosted a Black Light Dinner Party and Made a Cookbook (yes this is real) appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Back in the day, escape room owners would ask us, “How do I get you to come review my games?” and our answer was, “Have one of our friends get married in your city.”

We had near encyclopedic knowledge of the escape rooms our home market.

These days, we’ve more or less played out our home markets, so we find ourselves playing escape rooms far less frequently, instead traveling on reasonably tight budgets and playing in escape room destination cities.

Both modes of play have their joys and struggles, and I’m going to explore them.

Local Escape Room Play

When I say “local play” I am taking a slightly broad definition as, any region that you either live in or visit regularly, and play enough that you really know the market.

Most every avid escape room player is a local player somewhere.

Deep Knowledge

Avid local players tend to have extensive knowledge of their local market, having played just about everything that’s average or above… and they frequently have played a lot of the weakest stuff either out of curiosity, completionism tendencies, morbid curiosity, or as a joke.

A Sense of History

Local players develop a sense of history within their region. They see individual companies develop and progress with each subsequent game, watching that company’s style grow or refine over time.

The more curious and involved they are, the more gossip they absorb from within the community.

Newness Bias

They also tend to play games when they are new… and this can lead to skewed perspectives on those games.

Sometimes this means that local players are experiencing a game before it gets beat up or falls into disrepair.

Other times, local players experience a game before it has matured. This happened with the iconic game The Dome from Mama Bazooka back in the day. The local Dutch players visited while the creators were struggling to make everything work perfectly. Those of us who traveled to play months after it had opened saw a fully realized and complete experience. This led to some confused online discourse between the locals and the travelers.

Regional Flavor Part I

Most regions have a regional flavor to their escape rooms. The big chains and franchises don’t adhere to these, and there are always outliers. However, we see it in the rules, the gamemastering, the hint systems, the level of difficulty, the types of puzzles, and the way that story is expressed. What’s interesting is that most local players don’t know this.

It does present itself when extremely experienced local players from different regions get into arguments with each other in online spaces. For each player, the norms are slightly different, but they don’t have a great way of knowing this.

And for myself, one of the strange things about the New York City escape room scene is that it had a classic NYC melting pot vibe because early on we had companies from Russia, China, Hungary, Japan, and Israel. So we just walked down the street and played completely different styles. It was neat, and it was the thesis of our first Escape, Immerse, Explore Tour way back in 2017.

TERPECA Challenges

A common challenge for local players is that in most places (outside of a few hotspot cities), there are only a few rankable games in TERPECA, and even fewer nearby winners.

This leads to players wondering, “Are the games in [insert escape room hotspot] really that good?” And the answer is usually yes (as long as the local flavor is to your taste).

Local Pride

A common trend of local players is a deep pride in local favorites. You tend to find yourself recommending the same list of “must plays” to people and that list rarely changes.

Something that I love doing is getting to know the owners of my favorite games, and asking if they are open to me entering for free with my paying friends, when they buy tickets to the game (assuming I have the time to join them). This is a win-win scenario because the company gets my regular recommendation… and I get to hangout with my friends and watch them play my local favorites.

The Driving Radius

While some people jump straight to hopping on planes to hit escape room destination cities, most people in the US tend to slowly expand their driving radius for escape rooms. The path to becoming a traveling escape room player isn’t always a straight line, and it’s subject to a wide variety of outside factors, but it creeps up on most of us.

Travel Escape Room Play

Traveling to play escape rooms wasn’t something that we had considered until we were deeply involved in this community for a couple of years. For us it started with tacking on short layovers while traveling for work and life… and then slowly escape rooms became the thing that made us want to travel.

Astonishing Experiences

Our desire to travel for escape rooms is driven by the astounding quality of the games that we get to play when we travel. I assure you, if the games weren’t as compelling as they are, we wouldn’t do it.

We play far fewer games per year than we used to, but the average level of quality of what we play these days is sky high. Playing mostly while traveling is the only way for us to achieve this.

Regional Flavor Part II

I mentioned regional flavors earlier… but I want to impress upon you just how varied escape rooms can be when you travel.

Some of the more extreme examples will come from international travel. Tokyo, Beijing, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, and Athens all offer vastly different styles of games both from each other and from games that you could find within the United States.

And even within the United States: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orlando, Charlotte, and Boston all have distinctive styles from one another. The differences may not be as extreme as the difference between Tokyo and Athens, but they are very real.

Regional flavors is a deep topic, and something that we’ll inevitably write about in more detail.

Treading Where Tourists Don’t

Traveling for escape rooms tends to send us to far more interesting places that are devoid of tourists. This means that we aren’t usually eating at restaurants built for tourists. As an example, New Yorkers don’t eat in Times Square. Honestly the only time that I have visited Times Square for anything other than a show was for a friend’s birthday party a couple years back.

Times Square is overpriced and under-qualitied… which is a common outcome in tourist-focused neighborhoods. Getting away from these places is far more fun, interesting, tasty, and affordable.

Planning & Cost

The inherent downside of travel is that it’s costly in terms of money, time commitment, and planning. It just takes more out of you than popping downtown to play a couple of games.

For our part, we do everything that we can to cut costs. We fly cheap, pack efficiently, use mass transit wherever possible, and stay with friends as often as we can… but there is no denying that travel costs money. We budget and save in other parts of our lives to make sure that we can do this responsibly.

Intensity

On top of the travel itself and seeing the sights, travel for escape rooms is inherently intense, because unless you’re blessed with an abundance of time and money… you gotta play lots of games in a short span of time.

There are different schools of thought, and we have lived most of them.

You can go hard and pack in as many games as possible each day. While it has been years since we’ve done this, it was common for us to play 8-10 games in a single day for multiple days in a row. We had to forgo good meals to make this happen, but it was doable.

These days we play half as many games, sometimes less, and prioritize having 3 good meals per day.

The choice is a value judgement. Packing more games in reduces the odds that you’ll miss something great, but it comes at the cost of comfort and opportunity to reflect. Slowing down provides more comfort, and lets us spend more time basking in the moment after a great game.

We used to play more at once, in part, because it was difficult to effectively research which games we were most interested in. There weren’t resources to tell us which games would be high quality. These days, we (and by we, I mostly mean Lisa) can and do put in a lot more research prior to planning a trip.

In my opinion, there’s no right or wrong option here. Just make sure that you’re leaving enough time in-between your games to arrive on time for each game. Stuff happens occasionally, but if you’re regularly showing up late or missing bookings, you’re being disrespectful to the companies.

A Privilege

I want to be very clear about that travel for escape rooms is a privilege, and it’s one that we don’t abuse.

A lot of people don’t realize that Lisa and I still work regular jobs on top of putting nearly all of our free time into Room Escape Artist and the escape room community.

Our dream is to grow our community to a place where escape rooms are a meaningful part of the broader culture. That’s what we’ve been working towards here since 2014, and it’s what drives us to continually build our knowledge, expand our capabilities, care for our team, and refine our work.

Whether you’re a local player diving deep into a specific region or traveling the world, you’re helping to support this powerful and rapidly expanding medium of escape rooms, and we appreciate you for that. Just as we appreciate everyone who supports us on Patreon, whether it’s $2 per month or more. Every single person who contributes to our work is doing a huge thing for us. We hope that all of the content – both free and exclusively for Patreon – is bringing joy and value to your life.

Thank you to our Patreon backers.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Pants, Angela Ward, Marti, George Inglis, Василий Кумаев, Tiger Oakes, Keith Dozois, Simon Rühl, Hayden Sawyer, and Lennard Manke

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.

The post Playing Escape Rooms: Local vs Travel appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

For the herd

Location: Kissimmee, FL

Date Played: February 15, 2026

Team Size: 2-8; we recommend 3-5

Duration: 90 minutes

Price: $57.99 per player

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: None that we are aware of

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

“Doldrick’s Escape Room has made another hilarious and novel escape room. They packed Galactic Beef: The Cosmic Adventures of Star Cow with character, comedy, and fantastic team-based gameplay.“

REA Reaction

Doldrick’s Escape Room has always had a comedic bent to their games, and with their previous game, Crazy Train, they set a new bar. In their latest game, Galactic Beef: The Cosmic Adventures of Star Cow, they have truly seized the crown. Our team laughed our way through this hilarious experience.

The humor alone would make Galactic Beef an easy recommendation… but the greatness didn’t stop there. Doldrick’s packed Galactic Beef with characters and dialogue well past the point of what I had thought an escape room could handle… and they landed it. The story was as funny as it was followable.

To top it all off, Galactic Beef played extremely well. The gameplay was focused on team-based action. It did a fantastic job of keeping our full team engaged from start to finish.

The one big adjustment that I hope comes for Galactic Beef is providing clearer feedback when players get something wrong. As it stands, when we got something wrong, nothing happened. It wasn’t game-breaking, but it was an opportunity to make the ship feel more responsive.

Galactic Beef joins Crazy Train as an Orlando-area must-play escape room. With this latest game, Doldrick’s Escape Room is now a full venue, but I hope that this isn’t the last creation we see from this team. They are really damn good at this escape room thing.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Story seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Sci-fi fans
• Comedy lovers
• Best for players with at least some experience
• Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle

Why play?

• It’s hilarious
• Compelling, team-focused gameplay
• An abundance of endearing characters

Story

Join Star Cow’s legendary crew on an intergalactic adventure to help deliver a mysterious stranger to greener pastures.

Setting

Galactic Beef: The Cosmic Adventures of Star Cow was a deliberately designed game. The aesthetic felt a bit like a 90s arcade with black walls and colorful neons glowing under blacklight.

Beyond the physical design of Galactic Beef, there was a shocking amount of content within the game’s many screens: a universe full of unique characters and witty banter. It’s impossible to disentangle the set from the contents of the screens in the best possible way.

Gameplay

Doldrick’s Galactic Beef: The Cosmic Adventures of Star Cow was a narrative-driven escape room with tons of characters and a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around making connections and solving puzzles. The puzzles relied heavily on communication and teamwork.

Analysis

 Galactic Beef had more characters than any escape room we’ve ever played. It shouldn’t have been possible, yet we cared about them all. We were delighted each time a character appeared or re-appeared. Each was distinct, with their own personalities and motivations. They were memorable.

 Galactic Beef was marbled with a seemingly endless string of references, puns, and wordplay, and it still told a coherent and engaging story. Moreover, the story was easy to follow.

 Doldrick’s invested judiciously in Galactic Beef. The set was minimalist: black paint and neon tape. It was just enough detail to make us feel like we were on a spaceship. Doldrick’s saved the maximalist details for the animation that delivered the characters and story.

 The animation was out of this world.

 The set was packed with button-y buttons and switch-y switches. And we used them all. The set didn’t just give the facade of a spaceship. It was fully interactive. The hardware felt good and worked well.

 / Doldrick’s relied heavily on their animation skills, and most of these delivered. There was one specific instance where animation didn’t quite deliver on the video game-y interaction. This dissonance made the solve feel less satisfying than the tactile interaction should have felt.

 Galactic Beef didn’t give any feedback on wrong inputs. If we were wrong, nothing happened at all. We would have appreciated a thematic audio effect, just to let us know we’d done something, even if not quite the right thing. This type of non-responsiveness can slow momentum, especially early on. When one early input device had extra tight tolerances and we had the right answer, but just a hair off, we could easily have stalled. Notches or grooves would go a long way.

 There was an unusual cadence to Galactic Beef: a constant back-and-forth between story scenes and puzzle missions. With this flow, it was obvious where to focus our attention at any given time. The story didn’t compete with the puzzles. It was always clear (narratively and physically) what we needed to solve next. When we were solving puzzles, it was always the puzzles themselves and not figuring out what the game wanted from us. Furthermore, we had the option to parallel puzzle or solve linearly, but either way, we’d come together for the story beats before breaking out into puzzles again.

 During the story segments, we were standing on hard concrete watching a screen. Strange as this sounds, standing without moving can be more physically tiring than actively solving puzzles. Given this, while we loved the humor and the references, we can understand some players feeling that too much time was devoted to the story segments.

Galactic Beef culminated in a boss battle. This delivered the heroic moment our adventure demanded.

Tips For Visiting

• There is a parking lot.

Book your hour with Doldrick’s Galactic Beef: The Cosmic Adventures of Star Cow, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: Doldrick’s provided a complimentary game.

For more about Doldrick’s listen to our interview with creators Mike Dold and Rick George on The Reality Escape Pod.

The post Doldrick’s Escape Room – Galactic Beef: The Cosmic Adventures of Star Cow [Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Long-time member of our community, Simon Edwards, explained their situation on this Go Fund Me page, and I cannot bring myself to write their story… it’s too heartbreaking. Truly.

I will not in good conscience ask anyone who isn’t financially stable to help another, but if you are, please read their story, and consider sending a little support their way.

Escape Room Community Auction

April 2 Update: The raffle is now closed. Due to the extraordinary generosity of this community, the format is now an auction, which will raise significantly more for Sarah and Sharan. If you already donated to the closed raffle, this money will be used for any of your winning bids. If you donated to the raffle and do not use or succeed in winning any items, your donation will remain as part of the fundraiser, unless requested otherwise.

The escape room community has come together in an extraordinary way to support Sarah Dodd, who is fighting terminal cancer. Over 50 owners worldwide have donated an extraordinary collection of prizes — including some truly once-in-a-lifetime experiences. All proceeds go directly to her treatment. Bidding opens 2nd April.

March 11 Update: Escape room owners around the world have donated prizes for a community raffle supporting Sarah Dodd’s cancer treatment fundraiser. Prizes include escape room vouchers, online games, puzzle boxes and more — with new prizes being added regularly.

Get to Know Sarah Yourself

In late 2024, Peih-Gee and I recorded a beautiful podcast episode with Sarah, exploring her history with escape rooms as well as her health struggles. I’ve been proud of this one since we recorded it and was so pleased to have the opportunity to help Sarah share her story.

Please give it a listen, I think that learning more about Sarah will help you understand why she deserves our help.

It breaks my heart that Sarah and Sharan even need this help. Honestly, it’s just hard to even write this. I hope that if you have the means, that you consider lending them a hand.

The post Helping friends Sarah & Sharan who are going through hell appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

This is not the first time that my DMs and random encounters with escape room owners have come with the question, “Hey… umm… were you calling me out?”

The answer is unequivocally: No. I am not lowkey calling any of you out specifically.

If I was asking anyone to change with last month’s post it was enthusiasts, not escape room owners. Go back and re-read it.

Even this piece isn’t calling out a specific person or company because so many of you have asked me about last month’s post… and this is part of a larger trend.

Watching Trends

When I write pieces about larger trends, I am not calling out specific people… I am highlighting and analyzing what I see happening in our industry at large. In some cases, yeah, you might be one of the people who falls in line with the trend (sometimes for better, by the way).

If we’re calling out something specific at a particular company, then we cite the source. Richard Burns loves doing this in his writing… but you’ll note that when we’re highlighting a specific company in a thought piece, it’s pretty much always positive unless you’re lighting players on fire like an idiot psychopath.

Shining a Spotlight vs Waving a Flag

There are so many escape rooms out there, and there is so little time. We cannot play them all. More than 10 years ago we shifted from trying to cover everything to a model where we strive to shine a light on great games rather than wave a flag about mediocre ones.

Sometimes we seek out bad reviews, but that’s usually when someone has cultivated a reputation for doing terrible things.

More often than not, when we stumble into a negative review, it’s because the owner asked us to play it (often emphatically and repeatedly). We’re like Beetlejuice, say our name enough times and we will show up.

Coming From A Place of Love

A dozen years into Room Escape Artist, the only way that this all works is if its coming from a place of love. Love for the games, the players, and the creators.

But the funny thing is that if you only ever say positive things, then your words slowly become meaningless. If we like everything then our reviews are meaningless. And if we only highlight positive trends, then we are ignoring critical information.

We have a vast network of players and owners within our Patreon community that help us keep our finger on the pulse of the escape room movement, not just within our region, but all over the world. It’s an incredible group of people, and we could not do the work that we do without their knowledge, support, and funding.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Emilio Garofalo Neto, Leslie Chong, Heather Logas, Matt S., Mitchell Otis, Mike Hamel, Natalie, Sam Sharpe, Brandy Agerbeck, and Stims24

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.

The post This Post Isn’t About You appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Location: New York, NY

Date Played: November 4, 2025

Team Size: approximate 60 people per “pulse” (or group) seeing the show – come alone or with others

Duration: 2 hours

Price: ranging from $195 – $395 per person, depending on the day of the week and time of the performance

Ticketing: Public

Accessibility Consideration: Audience members should expect to be on their feet for most of the 2-hour performance. You’ll walk through and between spaces, including up and down stairs and across uneven surfaces. The show includes haze, strobe lights, and laser effects. (There is an elevator to accommodate accessibility needs; reach out to Masquerade directly for details.)

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

I wasn’t hopeful going into Masquerade, but my skepticism was proven wrong. I loved it.

In New York City, we’re coming off of a year where the long-running iconic show Sleep No More crumbled on the altar of urban redevelopment, and its hypothetical heir, Life & Trust, vanished into a puff of smoke with no notice mere months after opening. We were staring down the likelihood that New York City would be without an ongoing blockbuster immersive theater production. Things looked bleak, and to me, an immersive recreation of a Broadway show didn’t seem like the answer.

I was wrong, and I am thrilled.

From my perspective, Phantom of the Opera is a tired show with some great music but an uninspiring plot, and characters that are, at their best, difficult to root for. Mix that with all of the potential variability of experience in a large-scale immersive theatrical production, and I figured that Masquerade would bore immersive theater diehards and alienate traditional theatergoers.

I didn’t expect the production team behind Masquerade to put in the work to make a truly streamlined, accessible, and fair show, while also smoothing over some of the more egregious issues with the show’s titular character.

Mix that with fiery performances from the whole cast, and New York City has an ongoing immersive theater production that I deeply believe in. These performers gave everything that they had in them, and everyone in the audience didn’t just see it, they felt it.

I never would have recommended that my parents go see Sleep No More or Life & Trust. With these shows you had to either work very hard to get a good time… or get lucky. I’ll happily encourage my parents visit Masquerade. What it trades off in depth and possibility, it makes up for in consistency and fairness. Maybe I am getting older, but I am in love with the idea that everyone who walks through the door of Masquerade will have roughly the same experience that I had… because I adored that experience.

Immersive and Approachable

You can’t go wrong in Masquerade. The show was on rails, and each pulse was guided through the show together.

You’ll experience each scene from your own vantage point, which could be right next to a performer, or from the back of a larger room. No matter where you are for the scene, you can see and hear. Depending on where you’re standing, you might lock gaze with a character, hold a prop, or similarly engage with the performers.

The show was balanced and fair. Every audience member sees every scene. It didn’t award aggression like other styles of immersive theater, where audience members fight for positioning within a scene. There’s nothing to be gained by being first into the room, and the audience is choreographed through the space so that over the course of the performance you’ll be first, last, and in the middle.

The show staff were always present, invisibly guiding us into place and curating the experience for every audience member.

Structurally Complex

Masquerade is a pipelined immersive show, with six pulses per night (or weekend afternoon). This means six entry times, which are staggered by 15 minutes, and each see the same show in succession. The main characters – Phantom and Christine – stay with a single pulse all night. The other characters are choreographed so that they perform for two or three pulses, and the ensemble performs for all pulses. It’s an impressive feat of logistics.

As an audience member, you don’t see any of this. It happens invisibly behind the scenes as the show unfolds in front of you. You never cross paths with any of the other pulses as you move through the sets and see all the scenes. Your actors are the characters. Nothing else matters.

Resonance

The actors were incredible. We felt that about each performer we saw, and we’ve heard the same from friends who saw different performers in the same roles. The actors poured themselves into these roles. It’s touching to see these performances up close, and the emotional resonance of certain scenes landed really well in this no proscenium format.

With this staging, the iconic scenes that are the most memorable are the emotional ones where the characters make themselves vulnerable.

More theatrical iconic scenes didn’t always land. For example, one scene that brings the house down wasn’t as exciting as it could have been in this close up format.

The Phantom of the Opera, Enhanced

Masquerade reworked the telling of The Phantom of the Opera, and in our opinion, it was better for these changes. They dropped some of the scenes that dragged in the original show.

Most notably, they made the Phantom a more sympathetic character. They invented new scenes from his childhood, giving him a fleshed out backstory, and making him more relatable. We appreciated the show more by better understanding the Phantom.

The music has always been my favorite part of The Phantom of the Opera, and it did not disappoint. The sound design in Masquerade was incredible and the music was outstanding. The violinist was phenomenal.

Sprawling Set

The set was enormous, spanning multiple stories inside a Manhattan building, including a scene outside in the courtyard. The set was beautifully decorated, creating a sense of place for every scene. There were some beautiful reveals.

A few scenes felt under-designed, as if Masquerade had run out of budget or time. There were opportunities to make some scenes feel more natural or more lived in. And one reveal led into a big area that felt a little too empty as it came into view.

By requiring the audience members to come in thematic costumes, we all became a part of the scenery. Audience members were committed, and we admired gorgeous dresses and unique masks. As an audience, our presence enhanced the vibe of the set.

The set included a decorated off-boarding space where we could hang out, buy drinks, buy merch, and take photos. This set matched the vibe of the show. We weren’t rushed out of this space.

Who Were We?

We were the audience, and we were a part of the scenes, but beyond this, I don’t think we had a role in the show. We don’t necessarily need to have a role in the show. After all, at traditional proscenium theater, the audience is simply the audience. That said, I found myself wondering if we were meant to be, or could have been, something more than the audience. I’m not sure.

Tips For Visiting

• If you don’t know The Phantom of the Opera, or if it’s been a long time since you’ve seen it, we highly recommend rewatching it before you visit Masquerade. Unlike with other forms of immersive theater, you will see the whole show, but it’s still helpful to familiarize yourself with the characters and the plot.
• The dress code is strictly enforced: formal or cocktail attire in black, white, silver, or a combination thereof.
• Audience members are required to wear masquerade masks. You can bring your own, or wear one of the provided ones (which are comfortable and are compatible with glasses).
• Audiences members are strongly discouraged from wearing heels, and stiletto heels are not allowed.
• If you choose to bring your phone into the experience (rather than leave it at coat/ bag check), you will be required to put a sticker over the camera lens. There is an opportunity to take photos inside after the show concludes.
• Parking in New York City can be challenging. The nearest subway is the N/Q/R/W at 57 St-7 Av.

Book your time Masquerade, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

The post Masquerade NYC [Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Location: Holmdel, NJ

Date Played: November 9, 2025

Team Size: 2-10; we recommend 2-4

Duration: 60 minutes

Price: $39 per player

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: None that we are aware of

Emergency Exit Rating: [A+] No Lock

Physical Restraints: [A+] No Physical Restraints

REA Reaction

From the opening moments, we knew that Curse of the Hidden Temple wasn’t an average temple-ish escape room. Our first action immediately shed light on the design philosophy.

Throughout our experience in Curse of the Hidden Temple, we were continually impressed with how PuzzleConnect used lighting and sound to give puzzle feedback and progress game flow, direct our attention, and amp up the excitement. These subtle details had outsized impact on our experience in the game.

While the opening set wasn’t especially impressive, the intensity built deeper within the game; the temple looked great. Both the set and the props were detailed. PuzzleConnect’s commitment to post production enabled 3D printed props to feel at home in their ancient world.

The gameplay flowed well, a slower process puzzles notwithstanding, and offered opportunities for collaboration and communication.

If you’re looking for an escape room in central New Jersey with broad appeal, look no further. PuzzleConnect offers a great experience and (as of this writing) Curse of the Hidden Temple is the most impressive game in their lineup. We look forward to what they build next. PuzzleConnect has emerged as one of the standout escape room companies in New Jersey.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Scenery snobs
• Indiana Jones fans
• Any experience level
• Players who don’t need to be a part of every puzzle

Why play?

• Satisfying puzzle solves
• Well-crafted set and props
• The dramatic finale

Story

We had approached an ancient temple in the Amazon rainforest that was guarded by a curse that none had yet managed to break. To unlock the temple’s secrets, we would need to solve the ancient mysteries to break this curse.

Setting

We began just outside the temple, where previous explorers had set up camp, and left various notes and maps. The room was equipped with a desk, a stove, and various outdoorsy props. The temple doors loomed in front of us.

The temple – once we gained entrance – was a more impressive set with carved walls, a throne, and a sarcophagus centerpiece.

Gameplay

PuzzleConnect’s Curse of the Hidden Temple was a standard escape room with a moderate level of difficulty.

Core gameplay revolved around searching, observing, making connections, and solving puzzles.

Analysis

 The set looked great. The large set pieces transformed the originally strip-mall space into someplace else. The painting and weathering added a lot to the aesthetic and supported the idea that we’d stumbled into something ancient and hidden.

 PuzzleConnect used light strategically for gameplay and dramatic effect. From the onset, light led our path beautifully. Throughout the game, many of our favorite moments involved lighting our spaces through in-world interactions.

The 3D printed prompts looked and felt great. They raised the quality of in-game interactions. The detailed post-production work kept them from feeling like modern interlopers in an ancient space.

 Despite excellent attention to detail, Curse of the Hidden Temple had a few anachronisms. One larger set piece didn’t physically fit in the earlier act, but felt out of place in the later portion of the game. A few locks also looked out of place.

We appreciated the difficulty arc of the puzzles, starting with more approachable solves and building up to more layered puzzles, and some well-concealed reveals.

 One puzzle overstayed its welcome, requiring substantial reading and repetitive action long after we’d had the aha.

 Although we finished this game well ahead of the 60-minute game clock, Curse of the Hidden Temple still amped up the intensity of the finale. PuzzleConnect used lighting and sound to add drama and real sense of urgency.

Tips For Visiting

• There is a parking lot.
• There are ample food options nearby within Bell Works.
• Bell Works is also the main location for Severance filming, and may be worth a visit if you are a fan of the show.
• This game originally came from Giant Dream Productions, but PuzzleConnect made a lot of their own modifications, especially in puzzle design.

Book your hour with PuzzleConnect’s Curse of the Hidden Temple, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: PuzzleConnect comped our tickets for this game.

The post PuzzleConnect – Curse of the Hidden Temple [Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Date Played: October 10, 2025

Team Size: 3-5; we recommend 3-5

Duration: 75 minutes

Price: from €147 per team for 3 players to €195 per team for 5 players

Ticketing: Private

Accessibility Consideration: There are a few small steps within the game and one uneven surface.

Emergency Exit Rating: [A] Push To Exit

Physical Restraints: [A+] No restrictive physical restraints. See the end of the review for details.

“Aurum: Order of Gold was built around an unusual mechanic that enforced fairness of play. The irony of extreme fairness in a world built around gold and greed was not lost on us.”

REA Reaction

Aurum: Order of Gold was a remarkably fair escape room, and I don’t just mean that the puzzles solved in a logical way. It was fair because it was built to engage each and every player equally. I’m having a difficult time thinking of a game that provides a more even experience to every single player.

Each player was given a wrist-bound device, and this contraption made it clear who was going to do what throughout the game. It wasn’t like having an in-game “superpower.” We all had the same capabilities within the game. Instead it was a means of distributing the fun and challenge, and it was extremely effective.

To top it all off, BackSpace Escape Rooms built an unusual game world, and filled it with nifty interactions that we were delighted to share with one another. Aurum: Order of Gold was a mechanics-forward game with an undercurrent of narrative, and it came together in a well-executed package. I highly recommend playing this game if you’re in Amsterdam.

Who is this for?

• Adventure seekers
• Puzzle lovers
• Scenery snobs
• Players looking for something unusual
• Any experience level
• Team players

Why play?

• Wonderful team-based gameplay
• Some interesting set-based interactions
• A novel story and setting

Story

We visited the Amsterdam Money Museum looking for information about the Order of the Golden Dawn: a secret society that went dark in the 1930s and had focused on alchemy, or the mythical process of turning lead into gold.

Setting

Amsterdam Money Museum was a strange place from a distant time that never existed. It felt a little steampunk, and a bit mystical with some more modern flourishes. It was a unique space that was well-constructed.

Gameplay

BackSpace Escape Rooms’ Aurum: Order of Gold was an atypical escape room with a moderate level of difficulty, and a heavy focus on teamwork, collaboration, and communication.

Core gameplay revolved around teamwork, puzzling, searching, and communication.

Analysis

 Aurum: Order of Gold had an unusual vibe that melded different aesthetics into something entirely its own. From thrifted antiques, to unique lighting fixtures, to custom built mechanisms, to choice wallpaper and outstanding vacuform work, the experience felt crafted, and part of a distinct and, perhaps, magical world.

 BackSpace Escape Rooms created an atypical, in-world onboarding. It allowed them to place the Magic Circle when we entered the building.

 In addition, this intro – sent as a text message, and completed as a text dialogue with a character – provided more than backstory and mission briefing. It offered “defanging” for nervous players, where they could have minor details spoiled (increasingly explicitly) to make them feel comfortable playing the game. The Netherlands is dominated by horror games, and Aurum: Order of Gold was decidedly not horror, but it did have one mechanic that can make some players nervous, so this onboarding let players self-select into as many spoilers as they needed to be comfortable. It also reminded all players that the game is not horror.

After the opening scene, it was a bit awkward to enter the game itself. We understand why blindfolds were used, but wished there was a better way. The start had us a bit tangled, which diminished our confidence in the game.

 Onboarding continued in the game with a simple puzzle to teach each player key information that would be continually recontextualized throughout the game. As we played, the puzzles became more complex, but we continually built mastery. The progression was immensely satisfying.

Teamwork was central to every solve in Aurum: Order of Gold. Each of us had our role, and it was critical. The game demanded participation, but in a way that gently brought everyone into the action. This design also made it impossible for the game to be unbalanced in favor of a dominant teammate; we each had the same amount of and quality of experience.

While we delighted in the mechanisms that were central to many of the puzzles, they didn’t always work in intuitive ways, but also not in ways that were meant to be puzzling. This added confusion, and also means higher risk of players inadvertently damaging the game. There were opportunities to refine handles, levers, and knobs.

/ BackSpace Escape Rooms used one scene change mechanic that never ceases to amaze us. They presented it in a novel way such that each of us could really take it in. That said, for some players the effect was tempered by lack of sound insulation.

 Late in the game a presumed ghost puzzle distracted us from focusing our attention on what mattered. 

 BackSpace Escape Rooms used lighting expertly as feedback for completed puzzles, and to gently guide us.

 One key set-based input was heavily damaged, detracting from the grandeur of the moment.

 Our actions in Aurum: Order of Gold built toward a decision point. The narrative was clear, and our place in it made sense. We understand what ramifications our decision would have. The ending had meaning.

Tips For Visiting

• This game is playable in Dutch or English.
• Make sure you communicate the correct number of players to the company before you arrive.
• Don’t forget to read the text message you receive before you arrive at the game. Your onboarding starts there.

Book your hour with BackSpace Escape Rooms’ Aurum: Order of Gold, and tell them that the Room Escape Artist sent you.

Disclosure: BackSpace Escape Rooms comped our tickets for this game.

The post 👑 🔒 BackSpace Escape Rooms – Aurum: Order of Gold [Review] appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

This has been a mantra of tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, for many years. I’ve long agreed with the statement. If the tech doesn’t do what you need it to on the day that you purchased it, I wouldn’t bet on it suddenly meeting your needs later on, regardless of what the company behind it claims.

Over the past few years, I have found myself preaching an escape room equivalent:

“Never. Ever. Plan an escape room trip on the promise of a new game opening.”

Picking A Destination

If you’re planning a trip specifically to play escape rooms, you should plan it based on the games that you can book at the moment that you’re scheduling the travel.

If a company has promised an opening date, it’s not enough. It just isn’t. When it comes to launching games, escape room owners earnestly lie to themselves… but this can make them inadvertently lie to their customers.

You can believe that a new escape game is open when it’s open.

No Shade

I know that this reads like I am being mean. I’m really just trying to be honest and help everyone involved reduce stress and anger.

More often than not, when an escape room owner is wrong about when a game is opening, it’s because they are struggling. Building great things is hard, and creating one-of-a-kind experiences comes with a huge mess of variables that make timelines extremely difficult to project.

Often when an owner is declaring a future open date it is driven by a desperate business or personal need:

• “We need to hit this open date because it’s right before our busy season, and if we miss it, then we forgo a ton of revenue.”
• “We need to hit this open date because I am losing my %^&*ing mind. I cannot work on this $#!^ anymore. I just need it to open so that I can exhale and stop bleeding money and time.”

The brutal truth is that neither of these needs can force a positive outcome.

Set Yourself Up For Success

The best that you can do to make sure that you have a great trip is to design your journey based on games that exist right now.

This is a subject that has come up a few times over the past year in our wonderful Patreon Discord chat community. I won’t name names about the games that prompted the discussion, but rest assured, there are some exciting experiences likely coming in 2026. However, I’ve been around long enough to know that we should all be patient. Great things often take more time than their creators wish they would.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: David Rowan, Lo Co, Michael Swift, Jeremiah Sizemore, AJ Webster, Amy Schneider, Anjali Nath, Riddlehaven, Cath, Jonathan Cruz, Roger at Key To Escape, Anssi Tähtinen, Josh Russek, Chris Bittle, Brandi Miller, Katie Kasplode, and Emily Z. Jillette

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission

There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon or Etsy after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.

The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.

The post Never. Ever. Plan an escape room trip on the promise of a new game opening. appeared first on Room Escape Artist.

Along the way we got to talk about both how we exist and operate as a couple, as business partners, and as we do, we preached the gospel of escape rooms.

Marriage Therapy Radio

Host Zach Brittle is an utter delight. Prior to appearing on the show, I binge listened about a dozen of the more than 400 episodes in the show’s history, and what struck me was that each and every episode introduced me to a couple who exist in a way that is completely different from how we do. And I have no doubt that Lisa and I will seem pretty alien to most.

To our surprise, we landed on Zach’s radar by way of an anonymous escape room playing couple who sees Zach in his regular practice. If either of you happen to read this, please accept our thanks and gratitude.

And I will continue to be a regular listener of Zach’s. I love learning from other people’s experiences, and I also truly appreciate the opportunity to see and understand how other people live.

The Heart of Our Episode

At the center of our episode was Zach’s question: What can couples learn from playing escape rooms together?

It wasn’t until we were on the show, talking about the lessons that we’ve learned from more than a decade of escape room playing that we started to fully appreciate the idea that we live our lives like we play escape rooms.

For the past few days, we’ve been talking about other things that we could have talked about, or other ideas that have branched off of the conversation. I also had a big question that I wanted to ask Zach.

In time, I hope to ask him, as I am confident that this was the start of a friendship.

I hope that you enjoy a peek behind the curtain. Lisa and I have never been shy about our vast affection and respect for one another… but we have long been coy about how that functions and is expressed.

Thank you to Zach for the invitation. We hope that this episode was as fun to record for you as it was for us.

The post Lisa & David on Marriage Therapy Radio appeared first on Room Escape Artist.