Escape Room Reviews: Great Redemption
Company: The Great Redemption
Room: The Great Redemption
Date Played: 9/17/16
Player Count: 2, which was plenty
Success: Success!
Premise: "Great Redemption is a new fun entertainment concept based on the classic “Room Escape Game” now popular in many countries around the globe. Alex your friend framed you, You are under arrest in a police station and blamed for stealing $1-Million. There is one hour until the interrogator is coming back, get the money and all the evidence and escape from the police station!" —Great Redemption website
Immersion: Basically none. On a scale of '1 - Office Park' to '10 - Actual police station, which, admittedly, is kind of office-like' this rates a '2 - Hanging out in your friend's mostly finished basement.' At least there were bars on the cell door. Also, for no discernible reason, this is a low-light room, with one working flashlight provided.
Highlights: There were some puzzles, and some pieces of tech (by which I mean actual everyday technology, not RFID and Arduino-powered magical objects) that I've never seen used in another escape room. Black light use was pretty good! (I'm thinking of making Black Light: it's own section of the review...) Keeper never called us on the radio.
Lowlights: The production quality. The frankly excessive cluing. To give an imaginary example, not from the game, even though I totally could just post up the whole thing because there was no waiver of any kind (I mean, I wouldn't, I'm just saying, no waiver!), imagine if you were in a game where you broke into a bank, and you get down to the huge vault door, and someone has left a sign on the door saying 'The combination is weight of the last three U.S. Presidents' and also someone has left a booklet with all of the weights of U.S. Presidents on the floor, and the last three are highlighted. And also every other lock in the bank has a sign nearby. It takes perfectly good Aha! puzzles (the ones where you make a cognitive leap, however great or small) and turns them into process puzzles (the ones where you have to turn a crank 3 times until it's done.)
And Finally: I left this one feeling pretty conflicted. I feel like I'm rooting for them, but I can't tell if the muddled design and poor execution are clues that this room is a kind of cash-grab knock off of a proper room, or the above elements plus the novel fun parts just demonstrate a lack of ability or resources. I wonder, as I often do about movies, who the intended audience of this room might be. Who is this room for? It's not a good fit for a first-timer, who will be put off by the general chintziness of the whole thing and never come back to see a top-notch room. It's not really for the experienced player either - we're less than a dozen games in and blew the leaderboard times out of the water (as did the couple in front of us. And neither of us were added to the board, which I assume is another kind of ruse).
We found this game because it was available very inexpensively on Groupon, which was welcome after last week's expensive trip to the Escape Hotel. And to be fair, it did give us a little bit of that escaping-from-a-thing fix. So while I can't really recommend it to anyone, maybe who a room like this is for is... me!
A few methods used in this room are a) in my opinion, somewhat lazy and could be replaced by something that gets the same information across in a smarter way, and b) exactly the same as those we saw in use last week at Witchcraft.
Out of 10 rooms visited, I'm ranking this one #8.
How to book this room yourself: Visit http://www.thegreatredemption.com and enjoy the auto-playing tunes!