Escape Room Reviews: Ghost Ship
Special note: we were beta testers for this room, which was not yet open to the public at the time that we played.
Company: 60 Out Escape Rooms
Room: Ghost Ship
Date Played: 9/21/16
Player Count: 2, which is not enough
Success: Success! …eventually!
Premise: You’re in the hold of the ship of… ghost pirates? You need to escape and break that spell!
Immersion: It's very ship-like! Really great looking wooden construction abounds. There were a couple of objects that I don't know what they were supposed to be in-fiction or out, but that's more of fridge-logic than anything to think about in the moment.
Highlights: This room is huge! It might not by physically larger than The Lab, but I've never seen a room with this much stuff to do. Most rooms I've played have roughly 25 things*, and this is a room with over 40.
Some very cool magic objects - this is the top company for magic objects.
Lowlights: Not every magic object was entirely functional on our playthrough - again, it was a beta test, and the purpose of testing is to work out the bugs, so I don't hold this against them or expect that you'll encounter the same. But still - sometimes we had to have GMs come in to fix things.
We got really stuck on a puzzle where we tried the correct solution right away but for some reason it didn't work, so we ruled it out as an option. Wasting so much time fruitlessly knocking our heads against this particular wall was bad for morale.
And Finally: This room reminded me in a few ways of the other 60 Out room I've played, Senator Payne. The first half is mostly physical interactions with ordinary objects, which I found more satisfying than the second half.
Playing this game as a couple (our GM said the recommended group size would be 6-8) and as testers, it took us almost exactly 80 minutes to escape, and I think I was somewhat escape-room-fatigued by the end of it. With a proper group working out the non-linear segments as a team, and the room itself firing on all cylinders, Ghost Ship would be an excellent room for a medium or large-sized team.
Out of an even dozen escape rooms played, I'm ranking this one #5
How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.60out.com/rooms/ghost-ship
*Things, in this case, are objects you can interact with: clues, keys, locks, points of interest, anything I would mark down on my map**
**Obviously, I go home and draw a complete map of every escape room I play, with annotations for the objects, locations of the collectibles, notes about the flow of play and solutions. Obviously.