Warden’s Cabin

It was National Escape Room Day (not sure if it’s a legit day, but several escape rooms had it listed so let’s go with it) and we decided to take a day trip to Banff to try out the room there I discovered a week prior when I was there. Perry left a fortune at this cabin and you have to find it. The cabin is decorated so well with wood panels, wood stoves, camping gear and other knick knacks that were props and not clues (we found out the hard way). Now, while a bit laid out with certain puzzles and clues for the puzzles pointing directly for specific boxes, it didn’t detract from the immersion cause the puzzles were heavily immersive with their ties to the theme of the room. None of the puzzles were necessarily out of place. There’s quite a few logic puzzles, using he said she said and process of elimination and things like that. Apparently we were also the first team to complete a certain puzzle without any help. So, yay! There IS a second part to this which kinda took the immersion out for me a bit, but there’s a lot of effort put into it and more than I’ve seen at some other places trying to convey the same thing. Unfortunately, even with the 90 min time limit we were not able to finish the last puzzle in time as it was quite involved to say the least. But, our game master graciously gave us the time to finish the room as it was the last puzzle, there were no other bookings after us, and it was just us in the next room after this. Clues were given over and intercom system, with the game master watching and listening to us entirely. He was awesome. Couldn’t stress that enough.

This room was really well done and really detailed. This is a bit of a more difficult room, as such they have made this room an hour and a half time limit, the first we have ever played like it. The minute you walk in you feel like you are in a real cabin complete with everything you would normally find, backpacks, board games etc. Not everything had to do with a puzzle so sorting through all of this was a challenge. This room has a TON of puzzles. Definitely requires your group to split up and tackle some of them individually to best utilize your time. Like with Marv’s Diner this room again challenges ALL of your senses. There was even a small mini-challenge posed to us by the GM that could have gained us an extra five minutes of time, beware, this isn’t for the squeamish…That’s all I’ll reveal about that. Sadly one puzzle didn’t quite work as intended requiring the GM to come in and bypass it, but the dedicated GM was on top of it immediately and came in as soon as he saw it wasn’t working which was really appreciated. This was my favourite out of this company’s two rooms, and highly recommend it to anyone looking for a challenge.

Doing this room right after the relative sparseness of Marv’s Diner, what a difference in decor! Really great job with the theming in this one. There’s a lot to do, so our group was spread out and working away at a bunch of different puzzles- I could come back to this room again and have a completely different experience considering there was a lot of puzzle solving that I wasn’t involved in. I’d say pretty much all the puzzles tie in well with the theme, and there’s some pretty unique ones here. Some were really well done and creative, though there were others I found a little clunky, possibly too reliant on the players having pre-existing knowledge of certain things, and for one there ended up being a mechanical glitch. Fortunately the staff were watching us through cameras the entire way, so we didn’t lose too much time before one came in to help fix the mechanism. On that note, the staff here are pretty great, really attentive and enthusiastic. Rather than a hint system, they tend to offer advice if they find you’ve been stuck for a while, which is a good way to keep up gameflow and keep everyone happy. Great place, great room.