Alice in 3-D

Heralded as the first 3-D room in Calgary, it’s true as I’ve yet to anyone else claim as much. You wear glasses somewhere in between the red/blue ones and the movie theatre ones, that makes things in the room POP! Now that’s things like painting on the wall to the actual object situated in the room. That in itself was an interesting experience to the room that made it very trippy. We found ourselves struggling a bit in the beginning and then pulled through in the end. Lots of different types of puzzles in the room and some that require you to go back to previous items/positions for things to move forward. Another element in the last part was another one of those “point A to point B” puzzles where you know what to do, but you just need do it in a timely manner. One puzzle in particular that took our first hint, was a bit of a head scratcher in relation to the text we found and how to apply it to our environment in order to give us our clue. Not sure if we’d ever think of doing what we needed to do to figure it out.

Alice 3D- touted as the first 3D escape room, came with a lot of hype and with that, came a lot of expectations. While I applaud the effort and creativity, the 3D aspect of this room was not enough to set this room apart from mediocrity. Let’s talk about the 3D for a split second. We were given these dinky little Chromadepth 3D glasses you can get off the occasional cereal box promotion and if you wear glasses, you’re SOL in trying to make them both work. That leads to my next point- the difference between success and failure does rest on having these glasses on. The 3D really added nothing to this room. It’s a shame because I thought there would be more integration between that element and the puzzles to solve. With all that aside, there were some really good aspects of this room. The decoration and room quality were really well done. It was nice and colorful and it did make you feel like you were in a Wonderland so to speak. There’s a variety of different puzzles and for the most part, it was good but there was one puzzle where a hint needed to be burned because it was nothing we had seen before. Plus the clue on how to solve it was vague. There’s also a time waster where an immense amount of time and concentration was required, or else you’d end up circling back to find your position. I’d recommend doing this room with 4 or more people as there was aspects where a group can be broken off, but broken off in twos would be more ideal. One note about the game master- we almost had to leave the room to ask for a hint. I think we were screaming and yelling at one point because no one was responding. Time wasted, for sure. If the 3D is the driving factor in doing this room, don’t hold your breath on anything spectacular. The room itself is a good experience, though.

The 3D effect really makes this room pop! Confined has a lot of art talent on their staff, so the muraling and decor were great. However the 3D seemed like a novelty factor for most of the room, to the point that we got blindsided when the 3D glasses did finally come into play. The glasses aren’t very enjoyable to wear and rather flimsy, so that detracted from my experience a bit, unfortunately. The puzzles themselves tended to be more on the difficult side, so maybe not a good room for newbies? Some were less intuitive too- I’m not sure if we ever would have figured out one of the very first ones if it weren’t for some extremely specific hints. So yeah, some hiccups in this room, but it was overall an enjoyable experience, just some trip-ups with how intuitive some of the puzzles are.