Escape Room Reviews: The Clockwork Caper

Company: Perplexity Games
Room: The Clockwork Caper
Location: Cleveland, OH
Date Played: 12/27/17
Player Count: 3
Success:  Unprecedented success!

Premise: Sneak into the lab of inventor Patrick O'Malley and discover the secrets of his new machine for your boss, Thomas Edison!

Immersion: The production design of the room looks a little bit thrown together, but if anything, it's probably too clean for a real inventor's workshop.  

Highlights: We supposedly set a speed record and impressed our GM with how quickly we escaped. (I have this theory that the Escape Room GM Handbook tells you to tell every group how uncommonly smart, speedy, and handsome your team is, and if necessary how you came *this close* to solving it!) 

The non-linear design let our group split up and to each work with separate puzzles.

Lowlights: 
This room feels very short. By my reckoning, and by reckoning I mean carefully-drawn-after-the-fact map of the room, The Clockwork Caper has about half as many items / points of interest as almost any other game i've played. I was definitely surprised that the ending was, in fact, the ending.

There were a couple of mechanical puzzles that we probably solved more through brute force than actually understanding the underlying systems. 

And Finally:   What really drew me to this game was that the rooms seemed to be designed to have a connection to Cleveland history. There was a moment in the end game that really missed out on the chance to drive that connection home. 

We felt good about ourselves for cruising through a room, but unsatisfied with the experience overall, leading to my first time playing 2 rooms in one day.  Out of 14 games played, I would rank this one #10.

How to book this room yourself: Visit https://www.perplexitygames.com