X-17 Space Carrier

There was a long wait for this room to be done. It was shown as “coming soon” when Exit first opened in Calgary, and it seems like after over half a year of waiting it came out, and was extremely difficult to successfully finish it. I usually do escape rooms with two different groups, and I figured maybe with this being such a difficult room a team-up was needed to succeed. Nope. That didn’t even help. From the get-go there was talk about “replay value” as to how difficult it was. “Difficult” would be a key word as opposed to “challenging”. Those 5-digit turning locks need to be disposed of from all escape rooms as you have to have precision alignment in order to open the lock. That one ate up a bit of time. And if it has different colours on it, and those same colours are on objects that are clues to something else, maybe don’t use it. The 17 in the title dictates how many puzzles are in the room, being double the usual amount (8.5…?) which begs the question, if you have twice as many puzzles in a room that has the same amount of time as a regular room, would you have to be good enough to have escaped the other rooms in under 30 mins to get out of this one in 60? What’s worse is (if they’re using the same elements and naming process) their Richmond Beckwith location ALSO has the X-17 Space Carrier that’s only 45 mins!! Also that room can fit 2-10 players, whereas ours (according to the website) fits 2-6 players. But our host tells us it’s a minimum 4-player room, and the booking site allows up to eight people to be booked. Which is a lot of players and not enough space allotted. It was kinda cramped in the first part. And, I suppose the decor matched the theme, but was expecting something more slick for a space carrier. As to our play date, no one has succeeded in escaping in the 60 min time frame (despite their website saying otherwise as it looks just copy and pasted from other rooms). There is the option to book two hrs worth of time, as well a 2nd time play to start where you left off last. If you make it to the second part, I hope you looked at a spreadsheet recently.

This was quite a disappointing room for me. From the start, we were given a preamble and asked “Did you know this is our most difficult room? Did you know that we are aiming for a 1% success rate? Did you know we are aiming for replay value so that most teams need to come back twice to finish it?”. With statements like that I was already slightly turned off. I personally do not believe that rooms should REQUIRE teams to play twice to finish, and is a big cash grab. The room itself was not much better. The room was too small for the eight people we had and it was extremely linear (despite being told otherwise). So many of us were stuck standing around while four others worked on one puzzle, and when there was more than one puzzle, the other one was so simple that eight of us would be back to working on one puzzle again in five minutes. The puzzles themselves were overly complex. While they were solvable, there was about four different parts to one puzzle, keeping you on the same one for 10+ minutes at a time due to the complexity and brainpower required to solve them. The décor was so-so for me. I felt like there was too much junk lying around. While it is supposed to add to the room, I was not a fan of having to root through junk (some of it heavy) only to find that very little of it had to do with the game at all. I am all for a good challenge but this room was just plain frustrating and I did not enjoy my time in there.

I don’t know where to begin with this disaster. Let’s start by saying that this room was incredibly hyped and it took an exceptionally long time for it to be built. The doofus, who turned out to be the creator of this hot garbage, introduced this room to us and kept stressing about how this room doubles in puzzles (17 to be exact) and that no one has been able to get out and because of that, there’s plenty of replay value… Uhm, OK sir. Anyways, after the introduction and backstory, we were finally brought into the room and holy moly this room was small. Not only was it small, but it looked like my garage defecated all over the place. There’s just junk everywhere, most of it just to throw you off and I don’t see how that’s a good idea given the amount of puzzles there are to solve… If throwing you off wasn’t by design, it completely failed in the decoration department. This joint is supposed to hold eight people, but in reality, it should only hold five. There’s 17 puzzles, mostly linear, and you have eight people all working/waiting on one puzzle to be solved at a time. To break that up even more, four people would be working on a puzzle and the rest are just going through the junk hoping to find gold. Adding to that fact, these puzzles were not fucking easy and most of them had nothing to do with theme of the room. Oh, it was also pretty dark and had one very annoying strobe light. It felt like each puzzle needed at least ten minutes to complete. Going by that pace, there’s absolutely no way to complete this within one hour, especially if your team can’t break off and do other things. Right when that clock hit 0:00, I could not have been any happier. This room felt like a glorified cash grab. We were handed $5 coupons with them essentially saying “Haha you lost as expected- here’s a $5 coupon because we purposely made this room difficult and you actually can’t beat it in an hour or less.” Replay value, right. That’s just ludicrous. Rather than being logical with their puzzles, themes and room capacity, it felt like Exit Calgary wanted to show other escape rooms and even customers that they have the biggest balls by putting 17 puzzles in one room and only aiming for a 1% escape rate. If that was their goal, I think they succeeded. Otherwise, this room was a complete and utter disappointment.